


Breaking walls (down to the finest pebble)

by BlackCat (DarkCat)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alliances Are Complicated, Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Archex | Cardinal Tries To Be A Good Older Brother, Armitage Hux & Phasma Friendship, Armitage Hux Gets A Hug, Armitage Hux Has Feelings, Armitage Hux Has Issues, Armitage Hux Needs A Hug, Ben Solo Gets a Hug, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Ben Solo is a Mess, Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, Bromance, But Not In The Usual Way, Child Neglect, Codependency, Crylo Ren, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Constipation, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Everyone Gets A Hug, Everyone Has Issues, Everyone Needs A Hug, Family Dynamics, Fix-It of Sorts, Gaslighting, Han Solo Lives, Hux Discovered Palpatine, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, Internalized Heterosexism, It All Snowballed From There, It Gets Worse, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, It's Hard and Nobody Understands, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Kylo Ren Angst, Kylo Ren Has Issues, Kylo Ren Has No Chill, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Kylo Ren Redemption, Kylo Ren is a Mess, Loss of Identity, Loss of Parent(s), Loss of Parental Figure(s), Loss of Trust, Low-key Force-Sensitive Finn (Star Wars), M/M, Medical Torture, Mentioned Brendol Hux, Neglect, Nice Armitage Hux, Nobody is Dead, Nonlinear Narrative, Orphan Rey (Star Wars), Overly Long "How We Got Here" Montage, Parent Armitage Hux, Phasma Redemption, Physical Abuse, Poe Dameron's Chronic Hero Syndrome, Poor Dopheld Mitaka, Poor Life Choices, Possessive Armitage Hux, Protective Armitage Hux, Psychological Torture, Resistance Member Armitage Hux, Resistance Spy Hux And Little Rey Went On A Life Changing Field Trip With Phasma Off Page, Scavenger Rey (Star Wars), So Many Things Happening In The Background, Sort Of, Spice Runner Poe Dameron, Spy Armitage Hux, Stormtrooper Children, Stormtrooper Finn, Stormtrooper Rebellion, Tags May Change, That's Not How The Force Works (Star Wars), The Force Is Weird (Star Wars), The Truth is Out There, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, Toxic Masculinity, Unreliable Narrator, Vindicating Poe Dameron's Nickname, Young Rey (Star Wars), and how not just his son but all the Stormtrooper kids plus Cardinal and Phasma were subjected to it, but no one knows yet, we're meeting Janna at some point
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 66,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23839105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkCat/pseuds/BlackCat
Summary: Maybe if a young Armitage Hux hadn't uncovered a conspiracy older than himself while he was obsessively over-analyzing all First Order data to corroborate his organization's legitimacy just to find out all of his objectives and everything he stood for amounted to a lie, he wouldn't have sent the coordinates for Stakiller Base to the Resistance. But fate and the Force had a way of setting things up, and the truth might be far more complicated than any lie.…Years ago, Hux discovered Palpatine. Things snowballed from there.
Relationships: Armitage Hux & Archex | Cardinal, Armitage Hux & Armitage Hux's Mother, Armitage Hux & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux & Dopheld Mitaka, Armitage Hux & Everyone, Armitage Hux & Gallius Rax, Armitage Hux & Maratelle Hux, Armitage Hux & Millicent the Cat, Armitage Hux & Phasma, Armitage Hux & Rae Sloane, Armitage Hux & Rey, Armitage Hux & Stormtooper Character(s), Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Ben Solo | Kylo Ren & Han Solo, Finn & Armitage Hux, Phasma & Rey, Poe Dameron & Armitage Hux
Comments: 38
Kudos: 104





	1. Crumbling down (fight for another lost cause)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Present Date And Location:**
> 
> * * *
> 
> **… … …** Starkiller Base, 12:30 PM Standard Time. 34 ABY, Official Firing Date **… … …**
> 
> * * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keep in mind, before you start reading, that it's been years since Hux found out about the whole Palpatine Is Alive thing. So, as the opening lines would tell you, TFA and many events leading up to it went very differently here. Also, there'll be flashbacks.
> 
> Also _also,_ as a blanket warning for the story in general? _Mind the tags._ Cannot stress this enough. Overall the ones between ‘It Gets Worse’ and ‘Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting’ (which is a warning all on its own honestly).
> 
> That's it, enjoy!

General Hux of the First Order can't help but wonder what he did wrong on a past life to find himself in this situation. Goodness knows he must have done enough in this one alone to deserve it.

Starkiller Base, the weapon that was to be his greatest achievement, the weapon that was to be fired today after the speech he ought to have delivered naught but half an hour ago, is falling apart at the seams all around him while he runs single-mindedly through its intricate passageways and as debris starts raining down he asks himself:

_Where the kriff is Kylo Ren?!_

The one person he was sent to retrieve and the one he is currently trying to find. Since he was explicitly told, in no uncertain terms, that he had better go back with Ren or he might as well not go back at all.

Out of all the people stationed here Ren was the one lucky enough, or perhaps _unlucky_ enough, to be considered irreplaceable. Captain Phasma, Lieutenant Mitaka, even Hux himself, none of them matter in comparison.

All of their lives are subject to _replacement._ Mere assets, weapons like the crumbling planet that he's currently standing on: to be used by the Order to fulfill a purpose until the time comes when they're to be discarded and disposed off. With all of them being very much aware of this fact.

But Kylo Ren is not like them, despite the eager candidates presented by the man's own Knights, for reasons unbeknownst to anyone but the Supreme Leader. That, if anything else, is why Hux must find him.

It's not the _only_ reason, nor the strongest incentive. However the truth is something he keeps buried deep within himself and seldom dwells upon so that such private thoughts won't be picked up by any intrusive presence rummaging about his mind, if there were to be any.

Turning corner after corner, his search continues steadily despite the floor beneath his military boots increasingly growing less so. Either Ren has somehow intercepted the tracker on his belt or has merely gotten rid of it incidentally along the way. Nevertheless, Hux is basing his destination on what is nothing but a hunch that he hopes, for Ren's sake if not his own, doesn't prove true.

For the sake of everyone else that won't be allowed a chance to escape.

That troubling thought sinks into his chest faster than a heavy rock in a rapid river as he's making leeway among breaking walls whose crumbling materials, now ruined aesthetic and exact time of construction he could recall down to the finest pebble beneath shrieking metal. To the hour, minute and second.

He can't afford to dwell on it, he'd go mad.

He engineered this place to the last detail so it is almost instinctively that he knows where to go. The floor plans a clear image inside his mind's eye until he reaches a large room with several walkways leading up to it.

It's not the _place_ itself, but rather _what he finds there,_ that stops him in his tracks.

He'd used his personal comm device to hack his way into the Base's main communal announcement system since it saved him from a wasteful trip to whatever's left of the control room. He explicitly gave the order to evacuate, his tone unwavering despite having been ordered otherwise himself due to the minuscule number of people left when compared with the grand scheme of things, and yet—

The Base already feels like an ancient tomb he need only escape alone. While he'd _hoped_ for Ren, deep down he hadn't expected to find anyone else.

Still, there are two troopers from the lacking skeleton crew manning the Base standing frantic on either side of the walkway he must cross. Speaking each through a standard-issue comm device as they report to the bridge of the Finalizer the present state of the place, the lack of response from the main authorities on the Base and that they've just recovered consciousness. Their missing helmets serving to amplify the impression of their panicked state. Their blasters, too, are nowhere to be found.

One of them looks like she's been hit in the face by something. Debris, perhaps, but Hux isn't naive enough to assure himself that's what it was. She otherwise appears unharmed.

He recognizes her faintly, by number, as a member of the newest recruits allowed on the field.

She trained under him just last year and like many before and after her he's been overseeing her progress practically since birth, so it is against his better judgement and once again almost instinctively that he surprises both troopers by revealing his presence.

He marches purposefully into the walkway and halts in a deliberate parade rest meant to reassure, assessing the damage further, immediately turning towards the overtly injured trooper. She stands at attention, staring at him with an obvious wide open concern that reminds him of the need for helmets in the first place.

He understands the reasons for her expression, barring the present state of the situation. With his pristine hair standing up on end every which way and his orderly clothing so disheveled he must certainly look like a puffed up cat. Truly a sight to behold, for someone who'd only ever seen him at his most composed.

She doesn't look very well herself and there is not a chance in Alderaan, a snowball's chance in Jakku, that she can defend herself from an attack while she's like this.

The sheer degree of her naked although somewhat calculated vulnerability reminds him of a crying Phasma as she'd been that first meeting many years ago, shortly after the partial destruction of Parnassos.

Phasma's current location; yet another thing he can't afford to dwell on if he is to continue functioning at decent capacity.

"Stand down, trooper." He remembers to adhere to this single formality, before his stern hand reaches out firmly for her jaw and turns her head passively from side to side to assess the state of her injuries like a teacher's, like a parent's, would.

The faded purple impression of knuckles in her cheek contrasting sharply with starship-pale skin is but a confirmation to something he'd known from the moment he'd seen her. A shallow cut in her forehead is bleeding also, but other than a mild concussion she'll live.

The other trooper, one of his too as he realizes once he repeats the process with them, appears to have been left in a similarly disgraceful state.

He lowers his hand and feels, rather than sees, his own knuckles tighten into fists until the tips have whitened beneath the gloves. He closes his eyes and thinks of Arkanis. Inhales, exhales.

He tells them the location of the escape shuttle bay he'd had to verbally fight Snoke himself without the _Supreme Leader_ even realizing it to be able to install in case of this very situation, or something like it, ever occurring. Reassuring himself mentally that Phasma and Mitaka have seen it too.

There's very little probability that the latter is here now, and the former knows her way around.

Tells the troopers to take any survivors they happen to find with them anyway. And don't dare wait for him if— _onc_ e they do get there, that is an order.

He doesn't have to open his eyes to imagine the dutiful soldiers nodding eagerly before, thankfully, breaking off. He doesn't open his eyes until their footsteps sound far enough away that he knows he couldn't shoot them for abandoning their posts if he had to, if he wanted to.

Then retakes to his mission automatically, straining his legs so that they'll carry him even faster than before.

He's wasted enough time already, and the Base makes sure to remind him every step of the way as it shakes mercilessly under his aching feet, so used to the ache by this point of his life.

Hux takes notice of another wounded trooper he wills himself not to recognize lying face down in a corridor nearby.

He too is not moving, nor does he appear to have any wounds of his own, and he would seem unconscious as the General runs past him were it not for the smoke.

The tell-tale sign of blaster fire emanating from his hidden chest revealing the fatal blow that goes unseen.

If possible, Hux's pace quickens.

He moves along the walkway to the next section as the oppressive walls continue to crack and crumble to find more troopers still. Lying quietly, dead or dying. Unsalvageable.

 _Unsalvageable,_ he tells himself firmly. Even as each and every time his footsteps falter unhelpfully because he _has_ to check.

As he nears his destination most of their wounds start looking suspiciously, more and more, like something else entirely. Sharp, deathly. Cutting.

His journey to the oscillator chamber stops abruptly, cancelled. Because, like he had suspected since the moment that this whole mess started, there is no longer an oscillator chamber to try and get to.

He finally spots the cloaked figure with the charred cloak in tatters of the man he's come to find. Kneeling hunched over the rubble as a mourner in front of a casket, black and angry sorrow against the Base's silver-brown remains.

Clutching in his hands like a lifeline what would merely appear to be an inoffensive small black object to the untrained eye if not for the unstable, flickering, murderous red energy beams borne of it.

The _sharpdeathlycutting red beams_ pointed dangerously towards the chest of the man himself.

 _"Ren!"_ Armitage Hux screams, voice breaking mid syllable. Resonating through the carnage and the wreckage of his soldiers and his creation and his career.

The whole of the figure tenses like a nerve that's been struck whilst the horrifying red energy sword thankfully deactivates before sliding off both its nerveless hands.

Hux doesn't care; he's too busy running towards it in a fever pitch.

He's panting and he's breathless while the sweat of a lifetime of running from others, from himself, catches up to him and pours undignified from his forehead. Altogether with the rest of his face, it must be starting to resemble his hair in color for all the good the drainage of adrenaline has done him.

Try as he might to rid himself of every single bit of him that _feels_ for this man, for anyone or anything, the things that won't resemble hatred no matter how much he twists them; to deter and exile that part of himself to the darkest safest places of his psyche where he keeps his mother's face and the rain in Arkanis…

He can't. Not really.

The sensations, emotions, _sentiments—_

They're always there, will always be there. Waiting.

Biding their time much like Hux himself until a situation such as this set them off like a solar flare. Wild and free and burning the flesh that contains them like electricity pouring out from an open wire or blood from a reopened wound.

He's rushed forward, knelt down and grabbed Ren before his brain has the time to register that he's moved. Ren, who lets out a pained wail when he's pulled into Hux's arms from the side.

Hux holds on to him tightly and grounds him to keep him still as much as try and calm him down, but Ren only continues to hit him and cry and yell for revenge against the Resistance and the First Order both, against the Force and perhaps the universe itself. Unignited lightsaber forgotten on the ground. The power that would give him an unfair advantage all but an afterthought in the face of _iratefuriousfearful grief._

Hux allows him to despair, filing it all away into that crevice of himself no one ever looks to so he can pretend that he's never heard it and so doesn't have more of an excuse to shoot the man for treason.

"They _killed_ him." Ren says, finally, his broken voice both soft and raw like the charred flesh of the new cauterized scar on his face. "They killed him before I had the chance to decide. They killed him before I had to, and I don't think I could've. I don't think I would've. _I didn't—he didn't—"_

And so Hux understands everything, suddenly. He doesn't have to ask who Ren is mourning, he doesn't have to ask why Ren has done this. Or even if the frightened boy in front of him is Kylo Ren at all. Turning Ren towards himself, Hux does the first thing he can think to.

The one single slap rings unexpectedly loud in his ears against the backdrop that's the planet crumbling down around them. The ever increasing debris that won't stop falling, yet never quite hits them. Kriff Ren and his Force magic. Kriff Ren, whose face remains turned to the side the next few seconds out of pure shock.

Kriff Ren who stares at Hux blankly while said man's vision clears even as Hux hauls him into an upright position, like a husk, like what's left when a puppet decides to cut its strings loose, and shakes his head minutely as if he's trying to be rid of a vision he knows not to be real.

Hux roughly pushes him away with one hand and keeps him protectively from collapsing helplessly to the ground with the hold the other has gained on the back of what remains of Ren's outer robes, thank the stars for the inner ones.

When he stands up, he drags the Knight up with him by the collar and the forearm.

"Get a hold of yourself, Ren. Don't make me shoot you. I have every reason to, if you slow me down. With the kind of day I've had, you know I will." Despite the bitter cutting words, his hold doesn't waver. Even when it's changed from Ren's forearm to Ren's wrist.

When he starts walking away through it all, with the planet he's standing on collapsing in on itself ever so slowly like the catastrophe were a catalyst by design, Hux makes sure there's an extra pair of footsteps right behind him.

They wouldn't make it to what's left of the escape shuttle bay now. There's no guarantee that there'd be a way out if they were to get there. Their only hope for survival lies in finding their way upwards and praying the ship he'd left for a lost cause is still there.

The smoldering rubble never hits them, it almost seeks to avoid them as if it feared them. What there is on their way is violently swept to the side before they can reach it, not given even the dramatic benefit of a handwave or any other kind of proper acknowledgement. Hux finds himself yet again, by the millionth time, both hating and thanking the galaxy for Force magic.

It seems like forever before they reach the surface, yet by some miracle of luck or fate the black shuttle shines blue with metallic heat among the once verdant trees that have fallen and burnt down, instead of having sunk through one of the many angry red cracks that litter the previously snowy ground as their liquid fire _spills._ Tearing the planet apart with the brunt of a star that's gradually imploding.

He doesn't stop to think about how this would feel like if he hadn't brought Ren, and by extension the Knight's freaky powers, with him. The atmosphere is agonizing as is.

He punches the code in. His heat resistant glove bristles. The machine accepts it with an agonized _beep_ and the mechanical doors hiss open. In a couple of blinks, they're inside, and he cannot wait to get off this planet.

The automatic double doors have shut with finality behind them, the lights have fused out from the electric strain of having to keep the interior habitable, the temperature alarms are _blaring a shrill dying tune_ and once Ren is securely strapped to the co-pilot's seat and Hux's trembling fingers have pressed the correct sequence to begin the launch after a few false starts, he knows he's made it.

He watches his creation's implosion safe from above as the damaged shuttle takes off and heads up for outer space. Waiting patiently for it to complete its journey through the atmosphere and to a relatively safe distance away, which eventually happens in less than two minutes of tense sightless silence.

He thinks of Arkanis before prying his eyelids open by sheer force of will, unable to recall when he'd shut them. Sighing in relief at the sight of open space, a spectacle of distant stars, he begins setting course for the Finalizer.

They stay within that silence for awhile longer, their cooling starship slowly making way through the void between those stars.

Hux lets his stiff posture relax against the chair and feels his clenched grip loosen slightly upon the armrest of the ill-fitting pilot's seat as the small ship's inner-workings fill his ears. He's coming apart like an overwound rope, yet hasn't the energy to remain himself. He can't help but be glad that he is finally free from that wretched place, that he can breathe freely once more.

Ironic really, but he only ever feels this way whenever given the boundless freedom of space. There's no planet fit for him now, not even one of his own perfecting. His face, the best mask he's ever worn and by far the most effective of all, contours into something shamed but unreadable at the thought.

He created Starkiller Base, he shouldn't be glad that it's gone. Yet he can't help but think that this was one weapon that wasn't meant to be fired. Displayed, yes; but never fired. Can't help but be glad that it's been destroyed before it could.

Independently of what the blasted New Republicans have done to him and his generation of starved children from the Unknown Regions, the Imperials have done far worse. There had been idealists, like Rax and Sloane, but the rest are hateful scum.

Independently of anything within himself that calls for universal peace and a glorious purpose he _knows,_ with a bone-deep exhaustion that seeps into his frame like rainwater unto damp clothes, that murdering women and children won't solve the issue.

Even if he's doing it while murdering the ones that are at fault too, other people will suffer for this nonsensical Imperial front. Undeserving people always do. Most of them his; throwing themselves in the line of fire for a conspiracy, a poorly thought out lie.

…He's always known the odds, that doesn't mean he has to like them or agree with them.

He _made_ that weapon. Chosen because he's the highest ranking engineer, the best of them and the only one with a self-aware mind so vicious. Made it himself, overseeing every step of its creation. Poured his sweat and his tears and his lifeblood into it, until it might as well have become yet another despicable part of himself.

Build it quite literally from the ground up as a monument of grandeur to the Order, since he was told in no uncertain terms to make a weapon and that is what he made. One with each and every design flaw that condemned the previous ones which he could reasonably get away with.

Yet when he was told to fire it he fished inside his quarters for the security feed's blind spots, the places he knew the cleaning droids wouldn't look to and a search team wouldn't notice. He took a confiscated, discarded communicator older than the dirt in the cracks of his boots that he's never quite managed to scrap clean, and he sent a single message.

A string of coordinates and nothing else.

From that moment onward it wasn't his responsibility, but of whoever decided to either heed or ignore the warning, once they recognized it for what it was.

 _Well,_ he muses grimly, _heed it they did._

Ren's troubled stormy brown eyes stray to Hux like they've caught his musings halfway through.

And it isn't like he'd forgotten that Ren was there—because he's never been afforded the luxury to forget—but for a second he might've had dared, if only slightly, to pretend.

Hux sits quietly for a moment, trying to collect his thoughts.

In all honesty he's sure he'll never fully understand why Ren did what he did.

Ren is an unpredictable childish time bomb that didn't have to grow up barely eating enough scraps to keep alive because of _politics._ For all Hux knows of Leia Organa, politics paid Ren's meals.

Ren had apparently had a mother and father that loved him yet he willingly _chose_ this bitter life of disbelief and distrust in the hopes of… _what_ exactly? Something _better,_ perhaps? Or perhaps simply because he believed himself cast out of anywhere else he could think to go.

Either way, the obvious differences are far more than one too many. Ren's reasons for doing this, for doing anything really, cannot be the same as Hux's.

There is, after all, many a reason why he'd had Phasma kill his own father. He barely knew his mother. He's never felt the Force, not in the unconventional sense Force-users do, and he's certainly never _grieved._ At least not the loud, all-encompassing way that _Ren_ grieves.

Despite everything, if there is something Hux knows is that Ren must feel like he's failed in some way: that there is something wrong with him somehow and he needs to fix himself. A familiar and easily recognizable feeling, even in others, that made Armitage Hux's acquaintance sometime during his childhood and never really left since then.

While he may not understand why Ren is being torn apart, he acknowledges it for what it is.

Forces himself to _focus_ on it because, unlike everything else, this is something that he can at the very least _attempt_ to fix.

Against his fraying will, that kicks and screams inside his wreck of a mind about propriety and dignity, he lets his lips curl into a sufficiently believable smile.

"I'm glad it blew up." He hears himself say, his own voice unclear in his ears as if he were underwater instead of burning from the inside out, the fire starting somewhere between his ribs nearing the strained beats of a heart whose mere existence is relegated to his unconscious most days. His voice is hoarse. He doesn't know if he's being sincere, he can't discern it. "I'm glad you helped them blow it up, Ren. I won't tell the Supreme Leader, I won't tell anyone." He continues to stare out into space for a while longer before speaking again, firmly this time. "We should head back now, though."

_We can just go back and it'll all be like it was before. We can go back and find a better way to bring peace and order to the galaxy. To make the universe a better place for the people like us. One that doesn't involve genocide._

He doesn't say it. Ren doesn't hear it. But, damn him, Hux hopes he knows.

Hux hopes Ren's heard it anyway, through that Force magic of his, reassessing his grip on Ren's hand while the shuttle enters hyper-space.

Ren may not have been born one of his, but he's _chosen_ it, and that's all Hux needs to know. Ren needs something to live for and Hux needs something better to fight for than a smokescreen of lies from old Imperials, and this might just fit the bill. Something _better._

The Supreme Leader be damned if he yet lives, Hux will fight him. He won't deliver Ren. Not like this. For the good of his own survival he knows he has to, but makes himself promise that he won't.

He turns to look at Ren, once the silence becomes unbearable. Tears have long stopped rolling down Ren's cheek although they're yet to dry. The Knight himself is just staring straight ahead again, won't even move an inch, seemingly frozen in time.

Catatonic. Death to the world, to the galaxy, to the _universe._ Half his face lit up by the emergency lights and half his face cast in the shadow the void. Dark eyes so utterly devoid of life—

Hux calls his name in a desperate murmur, so soft he himself barely registers the sound. It has worked to snap him out of moods like these before, it might yet work again.

"…Ben?"

But Ren doesn't respond and remains unresponsive for the rest of the trip, no matter how hard Hux's hand clutches his.

Not, at least, 'till the shuttle is allowed entry into the Finalizer and they're both back on their ship. Back where they belong.

He quickly grabs Ren's shoulder with his free hand and _squeezes_ tight enough to bruise, shaking the man's frame slightly in frantic hopes of invoking any kind of reaction.

"I don't care where in the afterlife you've gone, you better wake up, you pfassking laserbrain of a nerve burner. I'll slap you again if I have to. I didn't risk my own neck to bring a dead man with me!"

It isn't until a few seconds later that Ren looks down at him, jerking suddenly to face him fully yet not breaking contact. His eyes widen in shock, blinking as he stares directly into Hux's own. From Hux's alarmingly concerned expression to their joined hands to the hand on his shoulder and back again, as if he's just become aware of it all. As if he still cannot bring himself to believe that it's real.

His face contorts into a distressed teary mess through a shuddering intake of air, like a statue that's had life breathed into it for the very first time. Made worse by the raw, unhealed future scar which Hux will slam a bacta patch over just as soon as he gets a hold of one.

It isn't long after that that Ren begins sobbing uncontrollably. It starts slowly but it escalates and it develops, from short hiccups to something miserable and loud. There are no tears now, just heartfelt _screams._

Before he can come to terms with what he's doing, what he's done, Hux pulls Ren close an hugs him tightly to his chest.

It doesn't feel natural; it feels anything but.

It's rather awkward, with the armrests of their chairs poised between them and the uncomfortable position and the fact neither of them ever allowed things to spiral out of control quite this much before, but Hux thinks maybe neither of them cares.

His ribs hurt a little more than everything else and he's suddenly, overly _conscious_ of it. One of them might've splintered when he'd been in a similar position with a half delirious Ren who, mad with rage and hurt and grief, had been trying to push him and punch him and get him _away._

Hux hears himself, somewhere in a dream or very far away, whisper soothingly: "I know, I know, it's alright, everything's alright now." And can't bring himself to believe the breathless mumble even if he wants Ren to with all of his being.

Dear stars above _,_ he's _holding Kylo Ren._

He's holding Ren and he's not made for this—

He's not soft—

He's _not soft,_ he's jagged edges and cutting remarks because that's what growing up in the Order stuck like dirt at the feet of old Imperials makes everyone that it doesn't break, in the end. Most Imperials aren't nurturing or nice, there's a shame in that, so the byproduct thereof would be lacking both.

There are very few kids that remain genuinely soft, very few that last long if they remain that way.

He shuts his eyelids and thinks of Mitaka. Of how lucky Mitaka is to conserve a minuscule of that niceness that makes him afraid. He thinks of Thanisson and Kaplan and Trach and every kid that, thanks to him, remains ever so dangerously _soft._

Phasma was never soft, not like them. She didn't have the softness beaten out of her, it was simply never there. In a planet as ruthless and wild as Parnassos it had been excluded from the main gene pool, seeing as _genuine_ softness got people killed fairly early on.

Phasma was never soft, no, but she still went into his quarters after a harsh mission and silently mourned the death with a bottle of wine. _Guns to be fired,_ she said, _that's what our soldiers are: good obedient disposable guns._ The slight trembling of the glass in her hands disputed that truth.

He could never meet her eyes when she said things like that; convenient lies that nobody believed. Them less than most, how many times had he spared her the conditioning? She should know better. She _does._ She shouldn't have to convince herself to the contrary.

There will always be casualties. No amount of careful planning on his part or erring on the side of caution on Phasma's will change it or serve to revert it. So Phasma accepts it ruthlessly during the conflict while in the battlefield and maybe outside it whilst Hux runs himself ragged after, thinking and reciting in words that blend together all of the million things he and everyone else could've done _better_ and will strive to do better next time as they mourn their death together.

This is a familiar position, holding someone.

Because, while he's never been in it with this particular someone, he's certainly been in it before. And he's not _made_ for it.

Not made to hold Phasma since he's a hundred ways more breakable than she is, but doing so without comment knowing he needs it more than or just as much as her.

Not meant to hold Kylo but doing so anyway because here now Ren is a frightened child. Because Hux himself was one at some point, and he's made it his duty to hold every frightened child he comes across, damn the consequences.

It's cold comfort for the burn of said weakness that most of his kids won't remember it anyway. A comfort so cold it, too, _burns._

They hold each other for a few precious moments longer before it all falls apart to the sound of blaster fire outside, colliding with the left wing and rendering their beat up shuttle unusable. They break apart as if scalded and turn to look at the glass that separates them from the rest of the galaxy as it all comes pouring back in.

Hux almost shrinks into himself at the sight of his troops approaching the shuttle like a declaration of war. At least a dozen of his stormtroopers and none of them hiding behind the relative protection of a helmet.

He _almost_ shrinks but doesn't. For all his weaknesses, he's better and stronger than that.

Before Hux's paranoid brain can start speculating on the one and a thousand plausible scenarios that could account for this, Ren's already lowered the ramp and has begun descending through it, leaving Hux no other choice but to follow. Marching and spouting orders, of course, in an automatic tone and a robotic gait that doesn't quite match with the image of a frighteningly competent General but resembles it enough that most of the troopers perceptively cower like the chastised children they once were.

He takes a familiar military stance, raises his voice over the crowd of stormtroopers and firmly orders them to _stand down,_ reciting the titles that everyone's memorized. "This is General Armitage Hux of the First Order, I've brought with me Kylo Ren, Master of the Knights of Ren. Stand aside in the name of the Supreme Leader!"

It comes naturally to him now while standing directly besides Ren; the speeches, the propaganda. Like breathing, if one is in a desert planet and air feels like grains of sandy fire inside one's lungs. It's bearable, barely.

It feels worse than usual today, but it's bearable and he clings to it like a drowning man that's mad with thirst and so has flung himself into the salty ocean waves.

He's surprised when it does nothing, when the blasters stay raised. Yet his sneer stays in place too. He's surprised, yes, but he'd never let it show on his face.

He raises his voice slightly, demanding to know if anything is wrong aboard his ship. A couple troopers look at each other nervously and say nothing. He recognizes them as the ones he'd told to escape the extinct planet he himself just left behind. They keep their heads down before trying to run away as he takes a meaningful step towards them.

They don't get very far.

He doesn't let the knowledge that he's saved them, that he let them live, stop him from pulling the trigger. The injured girl goes down with a shot to the leg, the other one with a shot through the knee. All in roughly two seconds, maybe less than that. They have the decency not to scream, then stop moving in an attempt to deter him from firing again.

He does it anyway, and they flinch one last time as the shots hit the tiled floor directly beside them.

He knows that they're alive still. That they'll recover with nothing but a few nasty scars if not treated on time. He clings to that knowledge as tightly as he does the blaster that he won't yet bother to put away.

Thankfully, his aim is always flawless, so no one else seems to think so.

He keeps his face unreadable and doesn't even acknowledge the two fallen traitors, his full attention to the vaguely hostile crowd.

Deep down, there's a visceral vicious voice that says he should have them all shot for mutiny.

It is resolutely ignored, though perhaps it infiltrates into his tone.

"Anyone else wish to test my temper? Or are you going to tell me what the kriff is happening here?"

A lone trooper steps forward through the crowd. He didn't even bother with the uniform, and is clearly recognizable as FN-2187. The single willing deserter among a long list of loyal soldiers. Or so Hux had thought. The sight of the other troopers makes him doubt somehow, but he shuts it down too as the original traitor, the Rebel scum, starts to speak.

"This ship has been claimed in the name of the Resistance."

Unable to stop himself Hux outright _hisses_ his possessiveness like the puffed up cat he looks like, momentarily made hyper-aware of the paper-thin blade up his sleeve that would serve him well at such close range.

He doesn't take it out, nor gives any sign that he has it. He does not stab the soldier directly in the carotid artery, his eyes don't even linger there for longer than is proper. But he's still outwardly carrying a blaster and the controlled murderous intent in his sneer could be misinterpreted as a desire to use it.

The former trooper facing him head on doesn't even falter. If he's scared, weak at the knees, he doesn't show it.

Hux would almost take the level-headedness for an admirable quality in an enemy, any other day. Today, though, it just makes him want to punch a wall until his fist starts to bleed.

He resists the impulsive urge with practiced ease.

The General speaks calmly, like the breeze before a storm. "The Resistance, you say. And why, pray tell, shouldn't I just have you shot death this instance for treason?"

"Because," FN Eight-Seven affirms, no-nonsense. "You're outgunned and outnumbered."

He resists the impulse to sweep his eyes through the crowd of familiar faces and numbers, many of them children he's practically raised himself from the moment onwards that they were orphaned, letting his right hand flatten into an open palm.

He signs visibly to what he knows is a very troubled, angered and over-eager Ren hovering somewhere over his shoulder that he is most definitely _not_ allowed to maim everyone in the room just yet, nor destroy everything in sight.

Hux knows he's outnumbered, yes, but he also knows that with Ren at his side he will seldom be outgunned.

Now, being in this situation, a part of himself wishes he were. It'd give him a valid excuse for his reticence.

These are _his kids,_ still. Hux is not yet psychologically ready to witness another massacre like the one in the Base. Even that skeleton crew had been too much for him.

The fact that he can inwardly admit to that is just further evidence that he's been emotionally compromised for a long time.

The whole of his mental shields shattered, he closes his eyes and thinks of rain.

 _Inhale, exhale_.

It always rained in Arkanis. It was bad for his weakened immune system. He'd been a sickly child, yet his mother would take him outside every time without anyone noticing because he'd always request it of her.

_Inhale, exhale._

He'd been hearing the rain since he was three, since he could remember. He'd been feeling the rain transverse shut eyelids since he was four and never really stopped until he was five and he had to leave on that shuttle with his father once the New Republic came and took away the only good thing he had.

_Inhale. Exhale._

He'd always loved the rain. It cleansed him; cleaned him. Sometimes he would wonder if maybe his father was right, if he was made off of paper: thin, flat, breakable, useless. The rain served to remind him that it wasn't true.

_Inhale, exhale._

Silly, indeed, but every time he stepped into the open air, every time that he didn't dissolve into nothing at the gentle pitter-patter of the water on his skin… it reminded him he was alive.

_Inhale, exhale. Inhale. Exhale._

He _thinks of rain._

And doesn't let himself open his eyes again until he can almost feel it collide with his forehead, running through his hair. The drops falling from the sky to the ground, from nothing to nowhere, and landing on him instead.

When he opens his eyes again, it has seldom been over a minute since he's closed them.

But he feels like _himself,_ again.

Not the fearsome General of the First Order, but the man that walks up to his quarters after a long shift at work and pets his cat and only after he's fed her lets himself collapse into his comfy couch then fall sleep with his greatcoat still on.

The man that he hasn't ever shown to anybody but whoever periodically revised the security footage, and that only sparingly. Never anyone else. Not Phasma, not Mitaka, certainly not Ren.

Neither did he plan to, until now.

Now that it doesn't really matter and he feels like he doesn't have to hide, because it's all over and he's probably going to get killed soon after this.

_Inhale, exhale._

_(Somewhere within him, there's something cracked that audibly **snaps**.)_

These are his kids, in front of him. Good at committing High Treason indeed, they have learned from the best of them.

The burning knot in his chest has loosened somewhat and he feels like laughing—just, not out loud. Just a lowly chuckle that slips fast past his lips like a little huff.

He cannot seem to remember when the last time he let himself _breathe_ was. Knowing his lot in life, there probably wasn't one. The ship's artificial air tastes glorious, like copious amounts of freedom.

His crushing grip slacks abruptly in a deliberate motion. His blaster clatters soundly to the polished floor in an echoing haunting sound. Making a statement. Implying the unexpected message of something like _surrender._

It effectively silences everyone on sight.

FN Eight-Seven _stares,_ from seemingly unarmed redhead to fallen weapon and back again, unwavering in his hostility but undeniably surprised. The soldier _stares_ still, short of invariably shooting him, and Armitage allows a small sincere smile to show on his face instead of letting the bubbling laughter make its way out like acid. It's a tired thing, barely a tiny lift of the lips. It probably looks like a half-hearted grin or a grimace, but when Armitage Hux _smiles_ for himself—he doesn't ever really.

He's tired. He's so kriffing tired. He's truly, awfully glad he didn't get to blow up that star system. He doesn't need yet another reason to lie awake for hours on end.

"Alright." He finally says, voice casual and uncaring with an accent slipping in. It visibly frightens the stormtroopers wavering unsure around them more than any amount of righteous yelling could have. Hesitant on which of the three of them to aim for, most settle for aiming at Ren. Armitage silently approves. "Where do I sign?"

"…What?" It's what FN Eight-Seven replies, surprised enough now that he lets disturbed confusion shine transparently through that word alone.

"What?!" Ren echoes furiously, somewhere to his right.

"My resignation. Dishonorable discharge, effective immediately. Where do I sign?"

"You do understand what's going on here, don't you?"

FN Eight-Seven speaks slowly, like he's talking to a rabid cur, a cornered animal. Like he thinks Armitage has dangerously gone off the deep end.

To be completely honest with himself for once, he might as well have.

If so, he does not want to be sane again. Madness is a lot less full of hatred and rage than it's made out to be and much more calm.

He should've gone mad a long time ago, it would've saved him an aneurysm or two.

"Hux, what are you doing!?"

Of course, the reason for said metaphorical aneurysms continues to be a constant obstacle to his peace of mind. But he wouldn't have it any other way.

He makes himself face Ren and does not let his smile waver, when it threatens to. "What I should've done a long time ago." Letting his hands soundlessly clap, point and wave aimlessly while he talks as they see fit, resisting the practiced impulse to clasp them both severely behind his back. He doesn't have to hide, he _doesn't._ "I'm leaving, I'm taking Millicent, and I think I'm taking you. If we find Phasma and Mitaka somewhere along the way, that'd be great too, but goodness knows Mitaka could benefit from a more relaxed working environment."

Leaving his back open to the enemy or as much as his kids could ever be the enemy feels like it goes against his nature and something within him keeps on screaming, but he _shuts it down._ Harsh, hard and fast.

It deserves this, for shutting _him_ down his whole life. It deserves this, whatever this is, that it is opposing so strongly to. He's certain of that much, through his fuzzy foggy mess of a mind that's been stuffed with cotton.

Even though he's still unsure on what the kriff he's actually doing. Still biding his time.

He _does_ have to go and find Millicent though. And like _kriff_ will he actually let Phasma or Mitaka stay here.

Not that Phasma would _want_ to but she'd want to _fight,_ instead of just leaving, and Armitage is still unsure on whether or not he wants to fight for another lost cause that will amount to nothing so soon after the last one went up in flames.

He probably doesn't. He's _fairly certain_ he doesn't. He's probably having a long overdue breakdown right now.

He doesn't really care though, because this feels way nicer than being himself on most days.

He turns to face… is it _Finn,_ now? Did he get that right? The informants tend to vary on account of accuracy. "Look, let us not make this harder than it needs to be, for everyone's sake. I want to leave, you want me out: it really is as simple as that. Now, _please,_ may I go get my cat?" Wait, no, not just Millicent. He can't forget about Phasma or Mitaka. "And my kid and my sister, while I'm at it?"

He'd been open and honest, for once, letting himself talk with his hands all the while. The same hands he always keeps clenched into fists in an acute military stance because they give him away.

Everyone _stares,_ incredulously. Just as blindsided as he'd hoped that they'd be.

The air he breathes is polluted with disbelief and distrust and it feels like he's been breathing the same thing his whole life.

Well, no more.

Armitage Hux is not having it any longer.

He takes Ren by the hand because he _can_ and just drags him along, like on the Base, as the troopers scatter instinctively to make way for them.

Either he's trained them well enough or they can see and are wised up to the fact that he's tired and he's _done_ with this. This whole lie they all believed. Whatever it is. Whatever it once meant.

It's most likely the former but for the first time in his life, he hopes it's the later.

…He just escaped a dying planet.

He just saved a man that on his better days he could almost admit he doesn't loathe from certain death.

He's holding hands with said man now. When the closest they'd come before was an occasional, coincidental brush of the knuckles that went unacknowledged while they walked side by side.

He just came back to his ship, his _home,_ being taken from him by the kids that he's raised into soldiers, together with the woman he considers his sister, in a thousand more gentle ways than his father would've done it.

The only kid that he's certain now wouldn't betray him is maybe somewhere around here, probably frightened out of his mind. Who knows where aforementioned sister even _is._

He misses his cat so much it physically pains him.

He feels like he's been running since he learned to walk and he's really, truly, _so kriffing tired._

Yet, nonetheless, he keeps on walking. Even as his legs burn with the heat of exhaustion and pain.

Better his legs than his lungs, he's learned that stopping never does anyone any good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As for Hux being able to conceal the two troopers' survival, keep in mind: Hux is one hell of a shot. That is straight-up Canon and you will pry it from my cold dead hands. Unable To View Author's Note With Creator's Style Turned Off
> 
> I will continue this, I promise. Unable To View Author's Note With Creator's Style Turned Off
> 
> Now, as for _when_ exactly we'll see Palpatine here? Unable To View Author's Note With Creator's Style Turned Off
> 
> Edit: Second Chapter is up, because the other story is not currently cooperating and I am the worst at being a diligent college student! Go check it out if you want, lots of Hux suffering there!
> 
> Newest Edit: The Kylux chapter (Chapter 6) is officially up, so with the shipping quota thoroughly filled I feel fulfilled and safe momentarily refocusing on College.


	2. Cannot be (enough for a child who had nothing)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Present Date And Location Updated**
> 
> * * *
> 
> **… … …** Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer Finalizer, 01:00 PM Standard Time. 34 ABY, Official Firing Date **… … …**
> 
> * * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The original plan for this chapter was as follows:  
> A brief Hux flashback. Majoritarily POV Kylo. Minoritarily POV… someone else.
> 
> You get _this_ instead, in honor of the ‘Parent Armitage Hux’ tag. Because Kylo is the worst and Hux would simply NOT. STOP. TALKING.
> 
> The narration will enter present tense only when/if we enter the current date and location, which will always be available in the summary. Meanwhile stay safe, mind the tags, and enjoy!

* * *

… **… …** Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer Absolution, 02:15 AM Standard Time. 19 ABY, Thirteen Standard Hours After The Raid / Six Standard Hours After Brendol Hux's Ultimatum That Armitage Hux Remain In the Absolution **… … …**

* * *

He was woken up by the soft sound of wild whimpering, roughly ten feet to the southwest of his position. The sound of legs and arms thrashing against sheets—

And then a _scream_ that positively slashed right through the peaceful silence of space and the constant of the ship's background noise muted by lifelong familiarity somewhere underneath.

_What the kriff—?!_

His eyes were open in less than a heartbeat and he was shooting up like a startled cat. Scrambling to his feet too quickly, too jerkily; leaving his tunnel vision to catch up with him as it tilted to the side, blurring around the edges. Spine straightening to the point of painful, crammed from having slept, however little, at an awkward angle. Left hand going for his hip even though he left his blaster in his quarters before sneaking in to keep vigil near the door with the express purpose to _avoid this precise eventuality._

Open just in time for his overhauled, raw awareness to catch and subsequently zero-in on the sight of a small body pitching to the floor.

_No, no no no no no—_

He barely made it on time. Had the blankets to thank, mostly; the tangled fabric slowing the child's fall to the floor just enough for him to act.

He'd darted recklessly forward knocking his right knee in the bed frame to another unoccupied bunk bed in the process, and almost slid through the floor on his knees like an clumsy overeager Lieutenant just assigned his own private quarters, but caught them before their body could tumble down completely and their fragile head of equally as tangled hair could make contact with the harsh metal flooring.

The feeling of falling must've scared the kid even more than they were already though. Because now he had a lapful of sobbing, semi-awake child hanging on to the front of his officer's coat for dear life.

And absolutely no idea what to do with it, besides. Aside from patting said child's back awkwardly and stiffly, the way Cardinal had done _him_ on occasion when he'd been just as small.

"There… there?" He tried. Half-asleep himself, and not nearly as coherent as he should be, and unbelievably tired at that. Voice almost faltering, coming out more questioning than comforting, an inflexible neutral inflection to it. "There, there…?" Grimacing at just how very clueless he sounded, yet not in current possession of enough energy to be able to muster the ability to care.

He wanted to groan and rub at his tired eyes. It was either way too late or way too early to be alive.

He was starting to think becoming an adult had been a _scam,_ because it didn't come with a regulations manual for what to do on situations such as these, and he felt so very useless not knowing.

Kriff, he was _exhausted._

In a manner of speaking, it was exhausting just _being_ himself.

Keeping up a front of composure in front of his junior officers. Supervising in person that everyone got settled in when all he wanted was to finally call it a day so he'd have enough in him tomorrow to properly evaluate all their mistakes and—maybe, yell at a mirror for failing to prevent them.

The hours after a drawn-out battle were always the worst, because time didn't exist. Everybody moved in a haze of exhaustion and pain and leftover adrenaline, stretched thin in between dressing wounds and making role calls, ensuring that everyone who could've realistically gotten out had or hadn't gotten out in one piece.

Nobody really had the energy to do anything else, not for a while yet.

No wonder he'd passed out, he should've known better than to lie down.

His eyes were so fuzzy from sleep, lending a surreal kind of haze to his surroundings that he couldn't seem to get rid of, not even closing them. Persisting like a sort of white noise, a minutiae of dots fogging his vision.

Despite the renewed batch of fresh too-real adrenaline befitting a triggered fight or flight response coursing unwanted through his veins like a curse, he worried for a dizzy moment that this was a dream—only to dismiss the possibility just as quickly.

His dreams never cut him this much slack. Not what scarce ones managed to sneak into his ever-elusive REM cycle. Not what scarce ones he remembered afterward.

He really _should've_ known better than to let his own uneasy paranoia lead him to pass out in a unoccupied, too small bed inside Batch Eight's younger cadets' living quarters for fear the newest addition would try to escape or do something equally as childish to otherwise compromise his newfound position.

Which they _hadn't._ This thing invading his personal bubble was just a _child._

This was ridiculous, he wasn't in danger, they weren't in danger, not now.

None of them were in danger, so he needed to make the alarms in his head shut up and shut down.

Needed to calm the unwanted muscle in his chest so that its beating would slow enough to let him think, needed to breathe normally again, needed to concentrate and find a way to—

He needed to find a cigarette first is what he needed to do, or else his neurotically fried mind was going to be less than helpful for this kid, he needed to mask the—

He still reeked of _sulfur,_ from earlier today. All things considered it couldn't have been a very comforting smell, especially not if he incidentally happened to be crowding their space.

For all he knew the _words_ weren't the issue. No matter how self-conscious it made him feel to be at a loss for those.

Yet removing his hands like they'd been burned and trying to put some much-needed distance between the both them only resulted in the child clinging even _tighter_ and him making a short, surprised, somewhat frightened exclamation in lacking response.

Subconsciously backing up against the wall slightly more and thereby making it all worse. His own hands frozen unhelpfully where they'd been lifted at his sides in indecision, never quite making contact. Foreign purplish fingers like little claws hanging fiercely on to his collar and a head of bed-hair all but burying itself in his chest.

So he had to be doing _something_ wrong on that front, too. Somehow.

Although apparently, by some sort of pity on the part of the universe, his most pathetic attempts at comfort actually _worked._ Since he heard—or _thought_ he heard, it could've been some exhausted brand of wishful thinking talking—a short, surprised and a bit hysterical bark of laughter filtering through the helpless sniffling like a rare ray of sunlight through grey clouds, or a message through wordless static.

"You're not any good at this, Mister—" The child was fast to correct their oversight. "Sir." Fast to memorize and adapt, but not nearly fast enough.

They would learn yet, he could forgive the one instance of insubordination, he could live with it. It's not like anyone but himself would know it ever happened, not in the long run.

He thought their voice almost sounded like a little girl's, even hoarse at it was, but he didn't dare try to identify it. Didn't dare think too hard about it. About how—young it sounded, how very alone and afraid.

"What scares you so, soldier?" He asked, carefully, on instinct. The same question Rae Sloane had asked of him a thousand times. The same stern, soft inflection; born of private practice.

Then bit the side of his cheek painfully in self-purported punishment until he almost drew blood, seeing as he immediately wanted to slap himself afterwards.

For daring to say it, for assuming it would work to soothe anyone other than himself, for assuming it would work if _he_ said it.

Was there a worse question to ask at the moment, a worse thing to remind them of, make them think about? Or was he fit to make the title for ‘worse makeshift guardian’ yet?

Well, _second_ worst, at any rate. Nobody could compete with the _Commandant_ for that particular title.

Although, if someone could, it would certainly be him. Make it a family tradition. Wouldn't that be ironic.

At least he hadn't dropped them, hadn't let them fall to the floor, hadn't left them there.

At least _he_ hadn't violently pushed them off of him, not even into their bed, and berated them for such unbecoming behavior.

…Against all odds though, the child didn't flinch away from him. Did not even falter in their closeness, as they scrunched up their nose against the overly soft teal cloth of his overcoat like the tears their body hadn't been hydrated enough to spill this afternoon might just make act of presence.

On the contrary, instead of coiling into themselves and hating him in the process, they buried their face even deeper in his already wrinkled uniform—which he hadn't bothered to change himself out of before all but passing out earlier, because he was supposed to just be checking in to keep the crippling anxiety at bay, he wasn't really planning to stay for this long in the first place, _he wasn't really planning to stay point blank, he couldn't—_ and started an attempt at talking through the thick gaberwool fabric. Their voice still lost and small and rough from years of disuse as it _broke_ during their somewhat grammatically incorrect attempt at heavily accented, basic galactic Standard.

"Explosions." They whispered, blankly. A sound soft enough to go unheard if he wasn't looking for it, much akin to what their sobs had been reduced to. Their tone betraying a primal sort of terror, little hands curling cloth into fists, digging into his ribs like somehow they could find a way to crawl inside and hide. "There were alarms and explosions, back at the mine. Before."

Oh.

Oh, they _were_ one of _those_ kids.

 _His kids,_ what a novelty that notion was.

The—underfed slave children from the colonized Outer Rim mining planet the Order had raided today. The ones he'd convinced his father to let him take under his wing, what an uphill battle that one was, with the poor excuse that it was about time he joined the family business.

The good excuse that they were hardworking. Uneducated. Malleable.

Afraid.

He'd suspected it, beforehand.

Hadn't wanted to believe it mostly.

He understood all too well, all of a sudden.

"Explosions." He echoed, mechanically. Yet to be freed from that earlier haze, from the exhaustion that sunk deep into his bones. His own hands settling over the child's back once again from their previous place hanging stiff and useless at his sides after he'd caught them mid-fall, failed to comfort them. Equal parts protective and possessive, as if he had a semblance for the capacity to make this better, as if he weren't at fault—

_Light, light. Don't dig in, don't press, don't hurt. They've been hurt enough, they don't need you making it any worse, teacher of the year—_

The child nodded in response to his previous monosyllabic sentence, frightened and frantic, as if confirming the answer to an important question during a performance interrogation.

They might as well have been made from clay or porcelain, for how very fragile they abruptly appeared to be. And he noticed their back remained as ramrod straight as his under his gloved hands, even as their slight form shivered and shook.

They'd taken the day's lesson to heart, it seemed.

Honestly he hadn't expected much to come of it yet when he'd told them all that keeping their chin high, their back straight, would help keep them out of trouble. Never hunched over, like it'd been their nature, what with the heavy mining equipment they'd strained to keep from dragging through the black ashen dirt _so that those monsters wouldn't—_

He should've known better.

He should've known better than to pull away.

He knows just how hard and how fast a child, this kind of child specially, can latch into even the faintest illusion of safety with a fierce desperation and be loath to let go; never quite do so.

He'd experienced it, himself.

Not to this extend, it'd be unfair of him to even think to compare, but he _had._

"Ah, kriff, c'mere." Before he could give himself time to reconsider, to regret it, to _think_ at all—he'd moved his hands to the kid's shoulders, guiding them gently back so that they were resting more comfortably against his chest, and held them close. Letting his own accent slip in a fit of weakness, hoping against hope that it would make him sound more human, less like—

Let them sob themselves to sleep, goodness knows it'd helped him when he was their age. More times than he'd be comfortable admitting, even to himself. It ought to help them, too.

Please, _stars,_ let it help them; he wouldn't know what else to do if it didn't.

They stayed stiff in his hesitant grip a few moments longer before relaxing into his lap as fully as they could, letting him support the whole of their feeble weight like a sleepy kitten.

He shushed them, softly. Rocked them, slightly, from side to side. Rocking his body in a soothing methodical motion, admittedly more for his own benefit than theirs, a familiar pattern.

_Inhale, exhale._ Forward, backward.

Compromised, tired mind utterly unable to form full-fledged, coherent sentences. Nevermind try and keep his body still against the unignorable compulsion to curl into a ball against a wall in some narrow corner and _move._

Forward, backward. _Inhale, exhale._

Just a pattern, same as any other. Just an order for him to follow, rearrange himself according to.

Just the easy fall of rain colliding distantly with the ground outside. With the transparent glass then the windowsill. With his own overly pale, nearly transparent skin.

In his mind, he opened the window. The rain hitting his hands felt like glass. If he _focused_ on it and let it drown everything else out, let it sway him like the breeze on a cliff, then maybe he—wouldn't have to _think_ about anything else.

…It was dark, a darkness absolute that brought with it a private comfort like that of the void throughout space which this ship roamed.

It was _dark._ Seeing as he hadn't a thought to spare for the lights when he'd barged out of bed like a fish from a net, expecting the relative freedom of open ocean yet only finding the proverbial hold of a fisherman.

Dark enough that he couldn't have thought to examine the child's face for memorable features he could more reliably use to recognize them even if he'd wanted to.

They were but a scruff creature of skin and bone clad in white pajamas, sterilized to cleanliness by the sonic showers and the inoffensive chemicals from the medical bay which he himself had examined obsessively beforehand to ascertain a safety for human contact. Clean anew since their time past in that horrible place of sharp crystalline walls, rocky dirt and ashen coal and _toxic sulfuric air._ Unrecognizable even in the most basic of features such as their gender.

A cold, pragmatic part of him told him it was better this way. Better that he doesn't know to get attached, that he doesn't try to.

Most of him just wanted to stay like this. Offer comfort, for as long as he could.

Most of him ached to do _something,_ anything, to be able to _fix_ this.

Most of him craved to take refuge in old, over-worn mantras and murmur them like a prayer under his breath.

 _I know._ His traitorous self mouthed terrified into their hair, without his crippled critical thinking's express permission, something that wasn't quite a thought yet wasn't quite a sound because it stayed unsaid. _I know, I know, it's alright to fear. It is wise to fear. You can be afraid, you can use that fear to strengthen your resolve as a means for survival; an urge to protect. Just don't let it rule you. Don't let it ruin you. Don't let it dictate who you'll become. Don't let it twist you into—_

He wanted to _tell_ them.

Goodness knows how much he himself needed someone to tell him when he was their age.

He wanted to _tell them_ this truth with all of his might. Held back by programming and detachment and interior rules drilled into him practically from birth.

By a fear of his own that making himself vulnerable of his own volition, letting himself be weak of his own will, would get him killed before—

_(He had a mission he couldn't run from. He couldn't afford distraction. Couldn't afford **emotion**.)_

Before.

…He forced the endless, soothing motion into a sudden _stop._

It was dark, and it was late, as much as the planet-bound notion applied. And if any of the other kids had been awakened by that _blood curling scream,_ or his own knee-jerk reaction of a proverbial grand entrance and the subsequent noise as said knee practically split into a spot of _hotwhitefresh_ easily ignorable _burningnerveending_ _pain_ that was bothersome only just because it wouldn't dull while weight was being put on it _no matter how little of that to speak of there actually was—_ they didn't give any sign of it.

Yet surely they all had awakened, the whole of them. They were light sleepers, same way he is, there's a reason they'd survived in that place under constant vigilance long enough to be found; what with its unstable narrow tunnels more fit to be traveled by small children than full-fledged adults.

He was thankful for their tact and discretion, honestly. Even if it were most likely born out of fear, much like their reluctance to escape once offered the chance to be taken from collapsing corridors of carved-out stone, to be _saved,_ had been.

More out of _fear_ than any kind of respect towards authority, or knowledge that he shouldn't be here, or acknowledgement as to another human being's inherent right to a relatively private breakdown.

An instinctive primal _fear_ which he wouldn't have to incite and inculcate, because someone else had done it already. Quite effectively, at that.

A traitorous part of him flooded with a cruel, twisted sense of relief which he wanted to _cast_ from himself and tear to smithereens and have nothing to do with about as soon as he felt it.

Another one just hoped fervently, vengeful, that, whoever it was, he was the one responsible for that particular death.

And he wanted to _cast_ that bitter sentiment from himself too. Somewhere unreachable. For how much like a monster it made him feel.

He wanted to, he did.

Just—not as strongly.

"There aren't any alarms here." Armitage Hux said, lied, purposefully keeping his voice low and even and _steady._ "There aren't any alarms, nor any explosions. There aren't any wars. Not now." He muttered. Lied. Again. "I'm alive, you're alive, and your fellow squadmates—your fellow _children—_ they're alive, too. You've found safety, I'll keep you safe. You won't have to struggle to survive yet, not again, I'll keep you all safe for as long as I can, the whole of you."

His team hadn't been able to get everyone out, not by a long shot, and he was keenly aware of it.

Some of them were already gone, either deeper in or buried under the rubble, and some others simply refused to leave against all effort made to the contrary.

Considering the size of the tunnel, and how he'd practically had to crouch to keep from hitting his head at the _entrance,_ it had been a miracle that they'd managed to take as many as they had.

He'd thought _Cardinal_ might've been sick at any moment; what with his posture unspeakably tense underneath that garish red trooper armor, certainly more than uneasy enough for it to shine through.

And the man had grown up in _Jakku._

…It'd been nightmarish enough as-is, without a child's imagination there to stretch the horrors. Relive the worst.

Said child shivered against his chest, and abruptly he was once again made aware of her presence. Of the others' stares: a prickly sensation at the back of his neck, always alert, on the lookout for some vaguely-there threat.

He relegated it to his subconscious as best he could manage, holding no delusions of the fact that it wouldn't come back to haunt him.

He sighed. The deep kind of sigh which comes from the chest when threatened to be wracked with a coughing fit, leaving one feeling heavier through the following intake of air.

Yearning for his bed that was only moderately better than the floor. For a warm, bitter cup of tarine tea that would successfully cover the taste of sulfur the way it tended to cover the metallic taste of his own blood. The way it tended to cover everything else.

Then _exhaled_ those unnecessary wants and needs, together with what little air he'd gotten back. Repositioning his hands to rest on her shoulder blades instead of directly behind the shoulders themselves, because apparently _this_ is just what people _do_ when they hug, as a socially accepted means of emotional support through physical comfort, and he'd—

Forgotten, somehow.

Then _inhaled_ as he tucked her in closer, under his coat like a comfy cape; cutting that earlier train of thought right off before it could leave the station akin to many others preceding it. Disregarding it for the wanton places it would lead him.

Exhaled… and inhaled again only after it became impossible not to, for the haunting manner the lack of air made his lungs _burn._ Resigning himself silently not to get up for the rest of this night that wasn't _night._ However long there was left of this six-hour rest cycle.

Let her sob herself to sleep, he needn't be the monster who told her not to.

He more than most understands just how ruthless it can be: getting used to the aimless coldness of open space after a long period of dry, unpalatable, agonizing bursts of sand and heat.

He more than most understands the inability to sleep. Honestly, he had his doubts that most of them weren't awake in the first place, aware of his presence in turn.

It wouldn't have been surprising if he had to deal with more nightmares once the whole of them eventually _did_ sleep.

"You're alive." He reassured one last time, yet again readjusting his grip for her benefit. Short ashen black curls sprawling over void-black gloves resting over bleached white fabric. "You're alive, and alright, and everything is fine now. I'll keep it that way. I'll try."

Lies among half-truths among _lies._ Unspoken promises he knew he just _didn't have_ the capacity to keep. Perhaps never would.

He knew he wasn't who he needed to be, to fix this. Wasn't strong enough, knowledgeable enough. Not yet the version of himself meant to accomplish feats of greatness, meant to do _better._

Perhaps never would be, if he were to be completely honest with himself. Let himself contemplate the truth to his own helplessness, his own uselessness, his own inherent weakness.

The truth to his own mortality, almost as fragile as this child's. Subject to the whims of the same monster of a man, the same vaguely-there threat.

Yet, letting exhausted eyelids close against the ingrained instinct to keep them open, he swore to himself that he'd _try._ Even if it killed him.

He simply _cannot stand it_ when children cry.

He'd take the universe on. Let it kill him. He didn't care.

The galaxy did _not_ get to lay another hand on these kids. Damn the blasted New Republic for not having cared enough to save them first, they were _his_ now.

Yet there was nothing left to say. Nothing he could do. Not as he was.

Armitage Hux had only ever known one person who could stand against the universe itself and _win._

She was _safety_ herself, and she was _light-years_ apart.

But he couldn't afford emotion, so he gripped his despair with powerful hands and shoved it down, finding his apathy from wherever it had fled to.

As poor a substitute as he might be, he'll have to do.

"I'll keep you safe, I promise."

His voice didn't tremble.

It didn't inflect, either, but it was the flatness or nothing at all, so he settled for what he could get.

He didn't mean to speak aloud, not really, but the words slipped out at the end of a breath and it was too late to hide them. To try and take them back.

He didn't want to, anyway.

"I know you will." She affirmed, the sleepy shadow of a little girl in his arms. Young and desperate and despite everything still more confident in his capabilities than he'll ever be. "I _know_ you will, Sir, I—believe you."

Something within him shattered.

"That's—" He coughed, through a sudden mouthful of ash, and grains of sand, and pain and _blaster fire._ "Very kind—of you."

He wanted to believe himself, too.

…If you'd asked him at any point before this one, Armitage Hux would've told you that he was horrible with kids. The only time he'd been halfway through to decent was when he'd been one himself, and not even then honestly.

He didn't like kids, kids didn't like him. They were scared of him, mostly, because of who he was, who he _resembled._

And they should be. He was fine with that.

Except—

Except _that was baggage._

Except he was— _not._ Not really. Not ever. He was everything _but_ fine with that, actually. But what else _could_ he do?

He didn't have much of a frame of reference to go on. It's not like he had a particularly nice childhood, himself.

Not when he slowly, searchingly, spent the last—lifetime working through some of his own landmines and untangling, exactly, how to _not_ raise a child.

But in a way it was that same fear of messing up which made him want to _try_ in the first place. Because, it was either him or the _Commandant,_ and at the very least he couldn't ever get it _worse._

He wanted to make life _better,_ for all these people around him who in another life he could've been like. Made frightened and hateful, so caught up in their own beliefs and perceptions of the world that they were rendered incapable of _seeing_ anything beyond.

For these _kids,_ who didn't deserve to end up where they were. To end up like the rest of his generation. To be—carved out.

For these kids who shouldn't have to grow up the same way _he_ did. The same way _they all_ did.

Wanted to give everything he _could_ give, realistically or otherwise.

Even if he's always known there'll never be enough in the universe _to_ give, for a kid who had nothing.

…By some last dregs of self-control, he kept himself from shifting that night.

Somewhere deep within the carefully constructed labyrinth of plans and procedures and schemes and schedules and _dreams,_ Armitage Hux refused to sleep.

It wasn't difficult. He probably couldn't have managed it if he'd tried.

* * *

**… … …** Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer Absolution, 10:00 AM Standard Time. 24 ABY, Three Standard Months After Brendol Hux's Reconvening With The Self-Proclaimed Supreme Leader Snoke / Three Standard Days After Armitage Hux Left Brendol Hux Stranded In Parnassos **… … …**

* * *

There had been rumours, back at the Academy. Of the First Order Colonel whose father was in charge of the program showing facets of himself to his assigned cadets when there was no other soul on sight to watch it happen. Showing something other than the by-the-books fanatic devoted to his duties and his cause the same way his father was.

The truth of them seemed undeniable at times, when confronted with how FN-1971 refused to give away who had helped them smuggle in their Kade Genti comics yet grinned confidentially at any mention of the Colonel's name for weeks afterward. The way the younger cadets looked at him admiringly, and some of the oldest appeared to respect him inherently.

Even so, not everyone believed them. Eight-Seven of the FN series never had until it happened to him, but it happened to everyone at least once.

The time came for him during a training exercise when he broke the previous year's upstanding record at his marksmanship class: ten straight shots to the heart and fifteen to the forehand of twenty five moving targets, his fellow cadets, without missing a single one.

He made thirty five, most to the chest instead of the head. The fact that the blaster had been set to stunt the only reason he'd been able to shoot at all. And shoot well, at that.

The then Colonel Hux hadn't visibly reacted nor made any kind of a fuss or a big deal out of it. Teal uniform pristine, his face the same mask of cool indifference it always was.

Not that anyone expected him to, even if he _had_ been particularly out of sorts that afternoon. Detached professional mask but only the slightest bit cracked. The bags under his lifeless eyes like purple bruising without General Brendol Hux there to make him default to discipline, make him stand straighter and seem taller and talk fiercely but robotically as if he were but a different kind of cadet himself. Make him function the way he usually made _them._

Out of sorts enough he'd been occasionally calling the recruits by shortenings of their given number that he'd either adopted from them if not the other way around, going as far as helping up the cadets who had the most trouble getting back on their feet after the partial stunt blast's effect faded without commenting on it, or telling them all constructive things about how to better their forms instead of just spouting critique for the sake of saying something that would be sufficiently acceptable for him to say.

"Good work today, everyone."

Something like the opposite of _that,_ just then.

It was their third class with the Commandant's son since the Commandant had gone in a mission they hadn't even the aspiration of the clearance to hear about, and not this man, nor anyone else, had ever said anything like that before.

Even if his next words, his parting words, were something somewhat closer to routine.

"You're all dismissed!"

Point being, the Colonel didn't make a big deal out of such a young cadet, practically fresh from conditioning, achieving such a hard earned record the same way nobody ever did. Not even Captain Cardinal in his natural, seemingly eternal bouts of considerate human compassion.

But once the class was finished he'd grabbed a firm hold of Eight-Seven's shoulder and said:

"Not you, FN-2187. I'd like to have a word with you."

The rest of the cadets picked up the pace as they orderly fled the room, one particularly hesitant girl wavering unsure at the doorway for a little while longer before hurriedly heading off so as not to be chastised during her next class.

Half a minute of uncomfortable silence followed before all possible witnesses were most definitely out of earshot.

When Eight-Seven was starting to think that this was it, that he would die here and this was how, the intimidating Colonel unexpectedly fell to one knee right in front of him. Still harmlessly holding on to Eight-Seven's shoulder, a small smile on his face not unlike the one he'd just had on the present day but bigger and _brighter_ and accompanied by a proud wrinkle in his eyes that was barely there or maybe not at all.

"Well done, FN Eight-Seven. You'll make a fine Captain one day."

After these short, equally as shocking words accompanied by the most diminutive almost undetectable tightening of the all but nonexistent pressure on Eight-Seven's shoulder, he just stood up before casually, like it was nothing, like it _meant_ nothing, gently ruffling the teenage-soldier's hair for what ought to be the first time in his life since he could remember that anyone but his fellow cadets had shown him a minutiae of affection or kindness.

The ginger Colonel turned to leave in the opposite direction the young soldier ought to have been heading for just like the present-day General had, leaving behind a very confused and slack-jawed FN-2187 clutching the active blaster that he hadn't even been ordered to put down with nothing to stare at but the young man's exhausted, retreating back.

Halfway through to the High Command door, seeming to finally remember himself at the lack of another pair of footsteps, the contradiction of a man finally said something else. An obsolete order thrown over his shoulder, together with the considering gaze from a single gray-green eye like the eye of a storm. Almost as if he had forgotten the necessity up until that point.

"You are dismissed, cadet. Hurry up, and tell the Captain I kept you."

The memory of that instinctive unbidden trust haunted Eight-Seven for a very long time. It felt like a secret, so he had endured the softer than average chastising from an equally as tired but still firm on his footing Captain Cardinal during their training drills.

Hadn't told anyone up until his unit had been reassigned with the less lenient although equally as ruthless Captain Phasma; shortly after the Colonel left only to come back with the Commandant, the aforementioned new Captain, and a purpling cheek to match the bags under once again empty eyes.

Then, he'd told the young girl his age that had almost stayed, the squadmate who had been more than that because she'd taught him to be kind. Taught him what hugs were, when no-one else was awake and she could risk it.

The girl whose death, whose bloody hand-print, would kick-start his own personal rebellion against the Order.

She only smiled, though her eyes were shining much like the Colonel's, with something slightly sad.

Smiled the same gentle though somewhat mournful way that the Colonel had during that fleeting instant, a resemblance that Eight-Seven could see only once he'd had a frame of reference to compare, as she said that she had been expecting it and wanted to see it for herself.

She'd never experienced it first-hand, that facet of the Colonel's. Not that she knew of.

But she once told him she'd dreamed of tears and a hug and a smile, and all the soothing words she'd taught this young child who would one distant day become Finn when he used to cry himself to sleep.

Told him she'd never forgotten that dream, even if it'd been a long time since then.

Told him that, for some reason she couldn't explain, she always believed.

* * *

**… … …** A Village In Jakku, 09:15 PM Standard Time. 34 ABY, One Standard Day Into The Hunt For The Map To Luke Skywalker **… … …**

* * *

Somehow, the village had been forewarned of their arrival.

Despite the whole of their efforts, Lor San Tekka escaped pursuit.

When he died anyway, from old age and at peace shortly after the completion of his task, Kylo Ren could feel it through the Force.

From inside him, Ben Solo had _screamed_ for the old explorer who used to accompany him and his Master on missions. Who never judged him. Who never saw him as the legend of his legacy, but only saw a child he used to be fond of when he looked at him. Who had always been kind.

And oh, was Ben _loud_ for a dead boy.

Kylo could feel that grief reverberating through him as if it were his own, and he didn't want it.

Wanted nothing to do with it.

So Kylo and his Knights of Ren killed all who dared to stay behind and fight, and he himself destroyed the whole of the village's shabby structures afterward, crushing them with one fell swoop of his right hand in a fit of rage. Burning it all down right after, to honor that old tradition spoken of in legend.

Ben stayed silent after that.

But not for very long.

* * *

**… … …** Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer Finalizer, 04:45 PM Standard Time. 34 ABY, Two Standard Days Into The Hunt For The Map To Luke Skywalker **… … …**

* * *

"Isn't it about time for you to leave, FN Eight-Seven?"

The sharp unreadable voice came from his left, like a predator jumping at him from where it'd been stalking him in the darkness of this empty hallway he wasn't technically hiding in, where the lights were fried because Kylo Ren—because _Lord Ren the Jedi Killer_ had passed through it earlier.

"General, Sir!"

It was so sudden it made _him_ jump. So much had the disaster that turned out to be his first day in the field rattled him, together with everything his role in the Order represented in his mind.

Made him jump in place like a frightened cadet instead of the dutiful soldier he was _supposed_ to be, against his better judgment and the whole of his training and the whole of his _being_. Against the robotic obedience drilled into him and what his upbringing had made him become.

Made him jump even though he hadn't had the privilege of doing so and letting it go unpunished for a long time now, and he certainly should've known better.

But the terrifying _(comforting, confusing, soothing, intimidating…)_ familiar voice didn't snap at him. Did not even chastise him. It just continued, almost mechanical in its intonation.

"There's a prisoner, a pilot, in the Containment Sector that needs guarding."

It just—continued, as if it had a message to deliver.

Which was just ridiculous.

A General wouldn't— _shouldn't—_ need nor want to say anything to a trooper.

And yet—

"I don't… understand."

 _He_ said that, that was him. That was his response and his voice arguing with a direct order, an active directive.

Even though he _should've_ known better than to discuss, to question.

Should've just obeyed, the same way he should've just—shot those people.

This was insubordination, he could very well get killed for this.

"What's there to understand?!" The General snapped at last, somewhat impatiently, as if they had a pressing time limit.

And since Eight-Seven had spent his childhood familiarizing with this tone he could practically _see_ the man's eyes traveling through the whole of their surroundings at hyper-speed the way they always did when he used it, as if the spectre of a dead man might overhear.

Then, softer for the confirmation that the threat was gone:

"Do as I say and perform your assigned duty, soldier."

"I thought…"

Nevermind what _he thought,_ he was not fit for active duty, and he shouldn't have been performing it. The General must've known this already.

This went against his previous orders from the Captain. What even _was_ this?

"Sir, I've been assigned for reconditioning—"

"Because you didn't shoot anybody."

The tone was so plain, so matter-of-fact, and now the General was directly beside him but FN-2187 still hadn't turned to address him directly, because it hadn't been ordered of him.

In hindsight, it shouldn't have been a necessity that it was, because that was simply what a good trooper did: turn to address the superior.

The superior who, or so it seemed at the time, always knew every thought and every secret and _everything_ about everyone inherently. Not because he could pluck the information directly from one's mind like a datastick in a terminal, the way he'd once heard in passing that Lord Ren could, but because the General had already mentally deducted and dissected all of one's feelings and motivations in turn even before the subject of scrutiny knew they were present at all, searching for a way to use them to further his own objectives.

See, Lord Ren might be the violent and volatile mind reader destroying key components of the ship in his rage on a daily basis, but General Hux was and would always be the more intimidating of the two Co-Commanders when it came down to it.

Once one has seen a man snap at attention like a droid whose perimeter radars caught sudden movement during the midst of cadet training and then proceed to _cut a hidden intruder's throat out in a perfect line straight through the trachea_ without anyone else knowing what had happened until the corpse hit the floor, one learned, memorized and gained a deeper understanding of the fact that complexion, looks and displays of power aren't always all that there is to a person.

So it is quite reasonable that Eight-Seven's response to those words and their flat intonation which bisected him in ways that went unsaid, once he'd been able to process them properly, was, without a shadow of a doubt, even more inappropriate than his previous one.

It wasn't a jump as much as a flinch.

"How did you—?!"

He stopped, then. Knowing inherently and intimately that it wasn't expected of him to question anything, much less in this manner. And that he'd done too much of that today.

Yet the General, composed as ever, entered his line of vision from the side. Blocking his view of the main deck, blocking the only source of light in this eerily empty hallway and his only exit and locking him off from the remaining of his squadron _( ~~Nines~~ FN-2199 and ~~Zeroes~~ FN-2000 were just talking about the battle, as if nothing were wrong, as if FN-2003, as if **Slip** , hadn't—)_ even though he didn't feel as safe among them without her there _(without either of them, they were gone, she'd pushed Slip out of the blaster shot's way for nothing, his unit was short two members and nobody else **cared** )._ Which just raised Eight-Seven's hackles further because it reminded him of screaming and _blood_ and sand and ashes—

But the man still didn't discipline him for his misgivings, for his sudden pale or his shallow breathing, and actually managed to seem soothing for the sheer familiarity of the strict pose that he'd been falling back into like second nature probably long before Eight-Seven and the rest of his squadmates had even properly learned to walk.

"I know shock of this kind when I see it. The context of the situation is quite clear to me."

The redheaded General kept going, unfaltering and unapologetic, posture menacing even without meaning to, tone sharp and firm but no less considering for it.

Kept going before he quite unnecessarily, or perhaps not, reinstated the previous request. Looking the young man who would soon become Finn straight in the eye all the while. His tone still even, but soft in a way it shouldn't be. In a way it hadn't been for _years,_ as he said his next words like they were an instruction instead of a direction.

"Report to the post you've been assigned."

The General's eyes were blank of emotion as he spoke, much like the rest of him. All sharp angles and military propriety, except for the slight shine to the crystalline green that cracked the facade as his slight sneer made a comeback. Like he didn't know what other face to make whilst saying this, and didn't Finn-as-Finn have recent experiences with that himself.

"Sir…?" He asked, because, this didn't have the feel of an ordinary— _anything._ Of an assigned duty, or an order. Or anything that had been demanded of him before.

"You're a good soldier, you have your orders. Let _me_ talk to Captain Phasma."

The man snarled, familiarly too, as if he were again the instructor that could practically read the cadet's minds. Eons before the actual mind reader arrived, come to stay like a bad cold.

Read their body language without bothering to stare at them, correcting their forms on intuition alone and practically always being correct.

But this time there was a sort of desperation to the sound that Finn's past self couldn't fully grasp, to his unreadable tone and the well-hidden frantic look in his eyes, as he elaborated as well as resumed his sole intent in a single word that revealed far too much for its urgency:

_"Leave."_

General Hux's eyes had turned to steel at some point before he himself turned around with a final exhale the-one-who-wasn't-yet-Finn was certain to this day that he wasn't meant to catch and marched away, and they'd cut through Eight-Seven and his resolve to go through with his previous orders and fix himself the way he was _meant_ to be like they were a knife passing through vulnerable skin at an angle, or maybe through the soft kind of butter he'd heard some older officers speak nostalgic of but never seen through his lifelong dietary regiment of ration bars.

"…Leave?" He echoed, dumbly, to a dark empty hallway. Feeling equally as emptied himself.

Those fierce frightening eyes so much like the nightmare that once were General Brendol Hux's, that saw everything through to his soul and seemed as if they disapproved of it, made him want to fulfill that request indeed. Even if not in the way that the successor to the title intended.

Because, although undoubtedly this conclusion would've found its way to him of its own accord at some point, it certainly hadn't occurred to him this early on that just _leaving_ was an option.

Or, maybe, the planting of this original idea had been entirely purposeful.

Whichever way it may be, at the time the General was right, whether in some backwards way or not.

He needed a pilot, and he needed to _leave._ And thanks to General Hux he knew just the place to find the only one who wouldn't be opposed to the idea.

So, Finn-not-yet-Finn made his way for the Containment Sector. To the man who would soon name him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone! Remember how I said this would be Kylo's POV?  
> Yeaaah…  
> Sorry, all you get on that front is a teaser (until about chapter 5). [ Unable To View Author's Note With Creator's Style Turned Off ]
> 
> So… [ Unable To View Author's Note With Creator's Style Turned Off ]
> 
> I didn't mince in the suffering and mental breakdown front though, as you could very well see here. [ Unable To View Author's Note With Creator's Style Turned Off ]
> 
> Also, writing Finn like this [ Unable To View Author's Note With Creator's Style Turned Off ] was certainly interesting experience. [ Unable To View Author's Note With Creator's Style Turned Off ]  
> 
> 
> September 1st 2020, [ Unable To View Progress Report With Creator's Style Turned Off ].
> 
> November 1st 2020, [ Unable To View Progress Report With Creator's Style Turned Off ].
> 
> December 1st 2020, [ Unable To View Update With Creator's Style Turned Off ].
> 
> January 1st 2020, [ Proper Update ] *flips table* SLAM that next chapter button people we have buffer to go through! *throws confetti* Happy new year and let us mourn the end of winter break everybody! *throws self into the sun*


	3. Colors blending (people can't choose when they leave)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Present Date And Location:**
> 
> * * *
> 
> **… … …** Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer Finalizer, 01:00 PM Standard Time. 34 ABY, Official Firing Date **… … …**
> 
> * * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, happy late holidays, for five more days at least Dobby is temporarily free!
> 
> Second off, there was a mistake a while back and an earlier version of this got posted for about five seconds total as a result? So blanket apology for the false alarm and for the lot of time that this actually took to get ready too.
> 
> On the plus side, I haven't been slacking off in any way so college and research and research-into-canon (taking from some things, disregarding others, being in awe of many along the way) have seen to it that this story be more accurate and for quality improvement overall. And I have BUFFER now! You get about a whole three chapters, one a week, before it runs out (and we'll see Kylo before it's over, just be patient ok, his chapter's the last of the bunch, he might even get two in if you do get that fourth one I've been working on).
> 
> That out of the way, I feel like this goes without saying but just in case: it is by no means necessary to know all of or even ANY of the reference material to properly enjoy the fic! It'd just enhance the experience because you'd know some surprises early. And some expectations would get subverted. (I should probably compile that list for you people but beware the length, remind me, if you'd want that.)
> 
> Overall? This was an ‘everyone and the plot and how we got here’ kind of chapter. You'll see some more of these going forward I think, they're there and just about every bit matters. As in, if you see something or someone I haven't foreshadowed in some way and this isn't the chapter where it happens? Consider my job a failure. I _do try_ to give you warning.
> 
> Speaking of which.
> 
> Do I /have/ to say the words ‘codependency’, ‘neglect’, ‘gaslighting’, ‘toxic masculinity’, ‘internalized heterosexism’ and /‘emotional abuse’/ for it to /be there?/ Because I feel like if I do I'm /losing something/ I don't know. Asking for future reference only. Except the shock and PTSD and some other fun stuff that _does_ apply here. Do mind that. Do mind the above in chapter two too. I'm very tempted to change the placing of this warning to there.
> 
> …I feel like I should tag that. I should maybe tag that. Or some of it at least. I should tag a lot of things. _Mind the tags_ is what I'm saying. They're just growing and growing in number as we speak. I have a backlog. It's ridiculous. Some characters should be their own warning.
> 
> Definitely tagging ‘unfortunate implications’ though. That one's a must. I have bought a house and now live there, the proverbial rent ain't cheap.
> 
> Anyway go ahead and knock yourselves out!

* * *

**… … …** Western Reaches of the Inner Rim - Jakku, 11:00 PM Standard Time. 5 ABY, Three Standard Months Until Arrival At The Plaintative Hand Plateau **… … …**

* * *

In the light of day, there might've been a certain beauty to Jakku's desert: thick, towering dunes as far as the eye could see. A flat curling plane where the sand looked like waves frozen in space and time. A desolate emptiness, ever changing, except in all the ways it stayed the same. The only thing interrupting the monotonous serene landscape an equally as towering figure a good twenty steps in front of him, undulating with the subdued sandstorm as if he were but a part of it. Heavy red fabric flowing in foreign contrast behind in a chaotic, grandiose flair.

At night though, it seemed almost haunted. Eerie and dark yet anything but calm; the wind was worse, if anything. The shadow of footsteps left in the figure's wake all slightly darker patches under faded starlight until however long it took them to dissolve.

Uncaring of the hour, sand flew by in much the same manner it shifted under protesting feet. Coarse and rough. Irritating. It got everywhere, constricting lungs, slipping into hair and eyes just as easily as clothes and boots and anything and everything with the cruel indifference of a force of nature. The world and its inhabitants were all the same for it.

In the light of day the dry unpalatable heat of the star this planet was orbiting almost appeared to turn the winds into a shallow relief, but now the cold air hit his face hard enough for it to feel much akin to as if he were being punched, the feeling familiar to him in nuances that spoke of personal experience.

He fought against it, stepping forward one foot after another. Eyes locked onto the distant shape of the man leading him, a dreary feeling filling his chest.

The man was remarkably easy to see. Red on white—red on _grey,_ held up proudly against unyielding gold. Colors blending together in the phantom of some memory unknown as the young observer struggled to see through the wind and the sand, arm held up like a shield over his eyes.

Part of him knew what awaited him, or at least feared it did.

Part of him felt like he'd been there before.

He'd started shaking at some point through the journey, despite the heavy Imperial officer's coat he'd found abandoned near the door and wrapped around himself earlier, something he'd have hesitated to do any other time but had done on a _feeling_ —one just like the one that kept him walking. Supposed to keep the cold out, but doing a rather miserable job of it.

Though maybe it was not the cold of the desert's night that caused him to quake, but the feelings flooding through him.

He himself was pale; pathetic, _fragile._ A grey— _white_ speck of dust in a landscape made off of grains coloured dark gold. Easy to miss, easily overlooked.

The man leading him through the cooling sands must think it a miracle that this pale, fragile boy wasn't blown away by the harsh winds yet.

He couldn't help but remind himself of how he still might be.

The man led him over to the tip of a cliff where the wind blew colder and harsher by far, a canyon extending far and wide before them, then sat down nimbly and nonchalantly right at the edge tucking one casual knee close to his chest with the other dangling dangerously over it like he himself had a lifetime of practice to fall back on; an outwardly tense gloved hand finally falling off from where it'd been grazing the holster of a chrome blaster.

The red cape flickered upwards with an almost practiced flair, raising a small cloud of golden sand, then lied loose and unconfined extended gracefully behind the Imperial while the wind caught it and carried on. Military standard sideburns and a mess of dark hair otherwise trimmed neatly into a sleek elegant cut peeked in contrast over it, flowing subtly with the rhythm of time towards the direction given stay air currents.

Armitage arrived what felt like a short eternity after, stopping a few steps behind and forcing himself to loosen his tight grip on the front of the too-big coat. Shuffling his hands into the pockets at its sides instead so that, unseen, they could shamelessly curl into fists.

He'd been doing that for as long as he could remember. Fleeing, concealing himself. Slipping away to find hiding places where it'd be dark and small and _safe._

It'd gotten worse on that very first starship, what with their bounty hunter of an escort's knack for finding him or simply divining wherever he'd go—but something told him he _needed_ to be brave, just this once.

So he did.

Gathering the whole of his energy he stepped forward and sat down beside the familiar stranger, faltering slightly, _slipping and almost tumbling downdowndown to_ _the ground below for it—_

And he would've, were it not for a hand flying to his side to steady him before he could fall, pull him back sharply from the brink of the abyss. A firm and unyielding hold that didn't recede until he was out of immediate risk.

His palms _stung,_ and he might've scrapped his thigh against the sharpened rock, but he didn't fall.

He _didn't fall,_ so he took a deep shuddering breath as he willed his terror away behind eyes shut tight and told himself there was no other reason for the tears slipping through save for the wind and the sand.

"Careful, now." A familiar voice muttered somewhere to his right, always light, always understanding, if only when addressed to him. "It is quite easy to fall off, and trust me when I say that if you do you shall have a hard time getting back up again."

Always sounding as if he were speaking from experience. A soft outward layer of sand that betrayed the unshakeable undertone of stone, seldom exposed like that of the cliff's edge when compared to the towering desert they'd all but left behind.

The man's voice was oddly melodical, a sort of dignified drawl, and although the edge to his mouth curled slightly upwards much like the tip of this natural wall there was no _real_ amusement or inflection in the words. Speaking to him was like talking to an actor stuck in eternal performance; like there was a barricade around his form, built so insurmountable that he wasn't just hiding emotion.

Armitage wondered if there was anything there at all. If the reaction would've been different—any less subdued—had the hand reached out too late. If anything in the whole of the massive universe would so much as _phase_ this man.

Bizarrely, he wondered also if his own tone was equally as flat. If he could learn to control it just as flawlessly, learn how to make the inflexibility a purposeful feature given time.

"You knew all along that I was following after you, Sir?" He asked, his voice an even neutral tone that he _just couldn't shake off._ His own sore throat uncaring of how questioning he meant to sound.

Asked, even though he himself had assumed it to be the case in the first place. After all, why would a man who seemed to know everything fail to know something as simple as that?

"You are certainly not as sneaky as you think yourself to be if you thought I wouldn't notice a pursuer, disappearing out like a thief into the night as I had been." And by the confidential shine of his smile as seen through the silvery white moonlight of the dual satellites orbiting Jakku, the man _knew_ he knew it too; a compassionate sort of shine like his mother's eyes, but artificial like the glint of cufflinks. It didn't dim one bit as the man continued, conversationally. "I see you took my coat."

He hesitated. Just a moment. Just the fraction of a second. "I could give it back."

It didn't went unseen, of course. Nor unacknowledged. "Taken a fancy to it, haven't you?"

The tone had been teasing—as much as this man's tone could be anything—but he knew enough about friends of his father's to know that didn't make it safe.

Not that this man was your typical Imperial officer, the way the finely-crafted white coat was styled gave that away.

And neither was he, precisely, a friend of his father's.

"I _can_ give it back." He assured anyway, already starting on the process of taking it off, resigned to withstand the cold of the cutting wind and the dessert's night in only baggy grey pajamas. "It's only proper that I do, it wasn't mine to take, I shouldn't have—"

Only to be stopped by the touch of a hand to his forearm through the now exposed thin grey fabric. Kitten soft and out of place, foreign in its gentleness for how different it seemed from the one before which had been unyielding.

Unyielding, steadying yet scary but still reassuring in a way his biological father's would never manage to be for the fact he knew it wasn't meant to hurt.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

"You needn't." The guiding hand that halted his movement more out of shock than for any intent behind it—the guiding hand that had _saved his life_ less than a full minute ago—left just as quickly; retreated, as if it'd been equally surprised by its own outburst of humanity. "Truth be told, I would have given it to you either way. In a manner of speaking, I… suppose I left it for you."

"You knew I'd need it." Armitage couldn't hold his tongue, though with anyone else he might have wanted to. "You knew I'd come."

For once, he couldn't be angry at himself for how flat the remark came out. It wasn't a question, it was a realization. A foregone conclusion spoken out loud.

"In a manner of speaking." The man repeated, with the half of a shrug and a subtle nod off to the side, his foot bouncing in place almost imperceptibly against the stonewall as if he were fighting with himself to be able to keep still. "I suppose. Yes."

The admission was odd.

This man had no plausible way to _know_ he would follow, beyond the shadow of a doubt, when he'd started walking through the shifting dunes.

Then again, he himself had no plausible explanation as to why he had. None beyond his burning curiosity: the familiar want to _learn._

The one that kept him looking through the clouds back home in search of the glittering stars beyond. The one that had a knack for guiding him to places and trinkets which most people overlooked.

He decided he might as well repay the rare show of trust with one of his own.

"I _know_ things too, sometimes." He started, already beginning to regret having spoken. "Things I shouldn't know. Things I've no way to confirm until they happen…"

He left a void to his sentence, let it trail off undefined.

"However, you do not know _how_ you know them, and sometimes you don't even _know_ you know them until they're upon you." The man finished for him, refining the concept. Letting out a gust of breath like a short laugh, both hands supporting him from behind as he leaned back in a casual pose unmasked for how hard his gloved fingers seemed to dig into the fractured dirt exposed by the elements and ageless time. Eyes glued to the stars. Still smiling, confidentially again now, though a little faded. "I know what that's like. I think it might be fate, or perhaps the Force. Something like it happened to me once. Mentally, I was not much older than you are now, at the time: I had gotten lost, but suddenly, I just _knew_ where I was meant to go."

"You think it takes us where we're _meant_ to be?" He hadn't intended to ask, not really, but—

"I think there is a path we are all meant to follow, weaved for us into the very fabric of reality itself since before our universe came to be." The man corrected him, not unkindly. "Someone told me once most people have no destiny; I have found that be untrue. Everyone does. We all do. I just don't yet know if we _can_ deviate from it."

He hadn't _intended_ to ask, not truly. But the figure of this man clad in front of a starry sky with bright red gloves like bloody hands and a mere grey undercoat to shield him from the elements, royal red cape fluttering free and creating shadows under the moonlight, dark glance glazed over and gone somewhere he couldn't follow—

It painted quite a lonely picture, and, even as young as he was, he'd been well acquainted with how this kind of loneliness felt like.

And this man…

Seeing him, it almost—

Almost felt, against all odds, like seeing a half-forgotten acquaintance of old once again.

"Aren't you cold?" He offered, unreadable, one final time. His inflection more befitting a statement of fact.

This so very much felt like meeting a childhood friend for the very first time. Like meeting someone he'd known _before._

The man arched a confident eyebrow as he gave a brief, considering stare; eyes identical tears on the fabric of reality, like staring down the black hole at the center of the galaxy. "Could ask the same of you, now couldn't I?"

Yet Armitage also couldn't help but feel like time was running out, already.

And suddenly he was well aware of his own jittery teeth that wouldn't stay unmoving no matter how hard he clenched his jaw. Of his own traitorous limbs that hadn't stopped trembling, _wouldn't_ stop trembling, resisting every attempt he made to try and _make them_ stop.

His body was not unused to this sort of abuse. Space had been _cold._ Arkanis was cold, too.

But Arkanis wasn't gold. Arkanis was _grey,_ in its entirety. Light grey trees, light grey clouds, light grey people with their weather-beaten faces and transparent complexion born not from the coldness of space but from the cooling humidity that settled into their core as well as their clothes, and a lifetime's lack of sunlight all the same.

Arkanis was half-empty, light grey pavement streets and grey-green leaves that travelled in the breeze with a soft to the touch sort of fluff clinging to them. Motherly hugs and pointing at stars under a light grey sky that often turned a tempest's dark grey at night. A soothing voice reading brand new words from dictionaries that painted the world in a nuanced new light and hidden, oddly colorful treats like a secret: all from a woman who barely looked anything like him so that not even the permanent pallor of both their skin was able to disguise the obvious dissimilarity, but who was his mother all the same.

It was distant dark grey cliffs and light grey shorelines glimmering in sickly sunlight almost to the point of white and the scent of _rain_ —the sound of droplets falling so fast one after another that it blurred together and the whole of it became one rhythmical, smooth, soothing melody. All its sceneries both vivid and faded since the rain often condensed into mist.

It was running through the shifting grey-green grass in patterns he alone understood to the cold, satisfying splashing of puddles and the texture of mineralized sand through soggy shoes that clung to it as if loathe to let go.

It was _rain itself,_ cool and collected a universal constant: the suns rose, the suns set, and he almost never got to see the welcoming white light of their dwarf stars through the watered down barrier of clouds…

Silver, transparent shards of heaven's dam when it broke down every day without fail. Hitting the ground far too fast for the untrained eye of a child to be able to catch, far too fast for normal human perception, though it wouldn't stop him trying.

It was dark grey coal-ridden mines under the light grey surface and smog that clung on to the clean air as effectively as it did unsuspecting, unprotected lungs like a disease; during the scarce times when the rain faltered completely instead of simply living through the comfort of intense-to-shallow intervals and back again like an ouroboros.

Arkanis was rain.

Arkanis was _home._

He wondered if this man felt the same about this hellish place.

He found himself doubting it.

This wasn't the familiar cold of Arkanisian rain, the humidity that was as part of him as his own lungs—and neither was it the chilling artificial sterility of space that he'd begrudgingly grown accustomed to along his trip from there to here.

This kind of cold could _kill,_ and worse of all it seemed to know. Self-aware in the way of shifting shadows hiding in the narrow corners of his bedroom back in the Hux Estate.

Yet, for him, it was still much more bearable than the dry ruthless heat of the uncaring sun that he'd been forced to face today.

Life, in all worlds, was complicated. He'd learned that much from this trip. But Jakku was different in a way that became increasingly harder to explain the more he thought about it.

Jakku seemed like the kind of place which possessed _intent._

The kind that _would_ kill you, but only when and because it wanted to, instead of death being a mere fact of life.

This man almost seemed the same way, at first glance. Accustomed to this fickle cold until he resembled it, much like Armitage himself had grown accustomed to the kindred rain.

Perhaps he'd been born to the hellish heat under the hateful sun, or to the dormant desert a night equally as cold as this one, the same way Armitage had been born sheltered from the everlasting constant of the pouring flood.

It felt undeniable. Like a truth, even though he wasn't certain were the idea itself had come from.

It felt like something he'd been _told,_ so long ago now he couldn't consciously recall when.

"…still here with me, little outcast?"

The man muttered something, sudden for its unexpectedness, snapping him out of his own thoughts and unknowingly preventing further philosophical musings. He didn't catch the entirety of it.

The sound forced him to surface, breaching mental waters, blinking his surprise and breathing again with a near silent gasp.

He'd become better at hiding it since Arkanis, since— _mum. Since mum got left behind._ Hiding emotion. Hiding the way he drowned in his own head, the way his chest hurt with each and every intake of air.

He'd become better at hiding it but the abrasive sand made it all the worst, and he had the impression nothing would fool this man.

"Here," the man in question sighed, as if conceding something to himself. Taking off the red cape in a swift motion and arranging it around Armitage like a barrier, like a blanket. Untying the clasps so he could tie it around _his_ neck, instead. "It'll keep you warm, kid, you'll breathe better through it."

There was something to that voice when the man dropped the Imperial Coruscanty-like formality, if barely. A characteristic which almost resembled that of the natives, just the slightest bit, and only if he were looking for it.

A similar accent, struggling to slip through at a moment's inattention as if it were a characteristic this man had actively trained himself to hide.

"You shouldn't have come after me."

The soothing voice was serious, suddenly.

There was an undertone of something, there, something dangerously like guilt.

He didn't like it.

Red fabric was warm around him in a way the coat just couldn't be.

This man hadn't any reason to feel guilt for bringing him here.

"You simply came." He defended, fiercely, without quite knowing why. "Like you said. It was my own choice to follow."

That earned him a laugh, short as it might be. Still a chuckle, yet different from the one before. The honest, rueful kind of laugh which is cheerful and kind.

"I suppose that _is_ true."

The silence was companionable, suddenly. Light and heavy with something unsaid.

What, Armitage suspected, neither of them knew for sure.

It was easily broken.

The man's voice carried airily through the wind, instead of in spite of it. He'd started humming, softly, a strange tilting tune that struck Armitage as belonging to a bygone era. A song like a mechanism. A song like clicking clockwork. A song in tune with the universe.

He himself had been right in his earlier assertions, thoughtfully labeling the voice as musical. The thought rang truer by the manner the tone rose slightly with the tune during the crescendos, approaching them and then ridding them as easily as—back home—a blue bird might the tide.

Singing without singing. Singing along to the pattern of invisible instruments as they played. It struck him as the kind of thing Mara— _mum, back home_ —might do.

On Jakku and many other planets, the sun was much too bright during the day. In any starship you had to find a window, and it was certainly a struggle to do. But back in Arkanis, although faded, whether it be night or day if you looked up you could always see the stars.

With those distant pinpricks of light reassuringly back in the sky, Armitage could almost pretend that he'd never left.

It was a while before the man spoke again, seeming displeased. Reluctant to have interrupted himself halfway through so as to continue the conversation where they'd left off. All the while, it didn't even occur to Armitage to disrupt him.

"There was nothing meaningful that brought me here, in case you were merely curious. Nothing but the force of habit." A shrug, an apparent attempt at a smile that fell short halfway through. "Still, I should've been strong enough to resist the pull to that place. If you remain moving you make yourself a harder target, and even the most vicious of creatures tend to keep away from the cliff's edge, but this dead and buried world is much more dangerous at night."

Armitage whisked away the starbursts of his own nostalgia, interest decidedly piqued.

"The pull?"

"That one outcropping of bent, flat rock?" He pointed towards a rock formation looming eternal far in the distance, vaguely familiar in the shape of dreams. "That's where we're going: the Plaintative Hand plateau. You can see it from here but it's much more grand up close. We're taking the long way around this time though, so you won't understand for a while yet."

_This time…?_

Ignorant of burning questions that went unasked, the man went on.

"The Anchorites consider it sacred, as the ancient home to the Consecrated Eremite when this planet was verdant and blue—then again they also consider suffering the basis of all life so what do _they_ know."

He explained carefully, cautiously. A tint of bitterness to the remembrance that was already fading into something else, something undecipherable.

"I've been watching over it a lifetime. Or so it feels like, sometimes. Standing guard long into the night, staring up and wondering—" He cut himself off, abruptly. Forcing his tone into something a bit cheerful but all fake that dropped immediately into a close relative to the dismissive monotone from earlier. "Well, something like that would be hard to forget. Sometimes I'd wake up, back at the academy, and panic. Wonder where I was. Who was watching over that place now I was gone. It was rather messy, the first few years."

_(There was something odd about that turn of phrase. Armitage just couldn't seem to put his finger on it.)_

"But you managed to unlearn it?"

_(This time…)_

"I managed to _suppress_ it." An honest smile, this time, tinted just slightly bitter with solemnity. "Places like these, _lessons_ like these—some things you just can't unlearn."

_(This time— **this time** …)_

Hyper-aware suddenly of the light blue pebble burning a proverbial hole through one of his boots, Armitage clung tighter to the red cape. A soothing weight around his shoulders, much akin to the way the Counselor's coat had felt at first.

Like a shield between himself and the rest of the world.

Like a burden, too, although truthfully he didn't yet know why.

Like something meant to— _protect,_ and be protected in turn.

"Yeah…" He replied, after a stretch of silence—reminded of deafening explosions, warm blood, heavy rain—a burning knot tightening inside his chest.

Of the way that days in space had turned to cycles, when he woke up wishing he hadn't, away from the only home he'd ever known.

He couldn't help but wonder if that'd be his life, after this place.

If he'll grow to be like space.

Empty. Artificial. _Cold._

"…Yeah, I know."

Silence prevailed.

This time, he was the one to break it, feeling almost as if he were reading from the pre-recorded script to a play.

"Counselor Rax?"

"Yes, Armitage?"

He'd never told the man his name.

Then again, it fit. His father had never so much as mentioned the plausible existence of a Counselor of the Empire.

Never even known, until recently, that there was someone out there as unforgettable and timeless as Gallius Rax.

So, this time, he himself smiled as he asked, with more certainty than he'd ever felt in his life:

"Tell me about the _stars,_ there's something out there for me. I've always wondered, what's the inside of one like?"

* * *

**… … …** Jakku - Nearing The Plaintative Hand Plateau, 08:33 PM Standard Time. 5 ABY, One Standard Day Upon Arrival At The Observatory **… … …**

* * *

"Are you well?" Archex asked, before he really thought about it. Willingly stepping out of line but for once not caring, brows furrowing in palpable concern in his own overly expressive face.

A child this small and frail shouldn't be _sitting outside._ A child this young should be _asleep,_ already. He more than most. They'd all had a long day, the weather hot and dry and sticky, yet he'd been out in the desert talking with the Counselor all day when surely a longer one expected them tomorrow.

Archex, himself, used as he was to these temperatures from lifelong experience, had found himself obligated to take the helmet off and peel the white fabric underneath the armor from his skin several times throughout the morning and afternoon; heaving a sigh of half-concealed relief as night approached bringing the promise of cooler temperatures.

_(He still didn't understand why the Counselor made them ‘stop to rest’ so often when they clearly would've gotten to their destination far earlier had they kept going. Why the Counselor insisted on steering well clear of the ongoing battle in the skies, yet going outside almost every time when it was much cooler and safer inside their transport shuttle for the lack of windows. Why he spent so much time instructing and teaching things to the Commandant's son. But the decision wasn't for someone of his position to even contemplate questioning, just like it wasn't for him to question why the Commandant had given armor only to him.)_

At the lack of an immediate response, he thought about leaving. Going to sleep, himself, like the rest already had. So far from the raging battlefield now, it would almost be safe to.

Leaving the Commandant's son to his own devices, against everything within him that yelled _disobedience_ throughout the insides of his skull at the mere notion despite not having been explicitly _ordered_ to do anything.

Then, he actually turned to face the child he'd spoken to, only for the expression on his face to catch him completely off guard.

He looked—

He looked like he might just about _cry._

And although Archex's first impression of him, that of a spoiled brat, hadn't exactly changed and something deep within him called out _distrust_ and he didn't really _get_ what the Counselor saw in him—it hurt his heart, just a tiny bit, to see another person hurt.

Just enough that he wanted to help.

But he didn't know _how,_ so he just—

Didn't move, but didn't leave.

The sun kept creeping across the sky making place for the twin moons, uncaring the creatures beneath, and the five or perhaps six year-old simply sat there at the edge of the silver landing platform as the golden sands turned vermilion then carmine. Watched the dark reflections of the dunes shift in angle and length. Watched the shadows fall across the horizon, closing in; sandy hair blown hazardously to a disarray by the harsh winds, strands strewn about like they themselves were ever-shifting, orange-red rays of dying sunlight. Observed even Archex himself from the corner of his eye on occasion, as if the young soldier were but a curious medical oddity to be examined.

By the look in his eyes like fogged over glassware though, he didn't _see_ any of it. Not truly.

Just when Archex had started to think he'd never get a reply, the oppressive silence pressing in on them broke with a snap.

"What are you doing here?"

He didn't have an answer for that, not really, he himself didn't know.

He only had his previous question to give, so he reinstated it.

"Are you—?"

Or tried to, at the very least.

_"No."_

It ought to have been impossible for a word to sting or _cut._ Yet this one, venomous and sharp, had the right properties for it.

"Why are you _still here?"_

He entertained the idea of leaving again, because the Commandant's son clearly wanted to be alone. His presence was unwanted here, and so were his words and his attempts to help.

Then the redhead blinked, as abruptly as he'd turned to face Archex when he himself had made the mistake of speaking out of turn. Blinked as if he were blinking back tears, a childish expression of frustrated furious _dismay_ clouding his features for a single second before he'd completely closed them off. Turned again to stare defiant at the receding sun like his eyes alone had the power to halt it's descent.

He'd seen the Counselor do it, before, closing off so completely that not the faintest hint of a soul would shine through. Yet it was so very shocking to see from a _child._

Even if this child had an air to him that made some remnant of animal instinct within Archex want to _flee._

Why _was_ he still here?

Wasn't _that_ the question of the year.

"Why are _you?"_

That earned him a laugh, short and deprecating as it happened to be.

Deprecating to which of them, he didn't know either.

"Counselor Rax will die. Tomorrow."

The figure of a child said, almost casually, against the backdrop of the darkening dunes. Suddenly and with a certainty that felt final; gripping the gray fabric of his pant-legs above his knees with both hands tight enough for already pale knuckles to turn white. As if he weren't guessing, as if he _knew._

"That—can't be right."

But it _couldn't be_ true, could it?

The Counselor seemed eternal, unfazed, as immemorial as the Valley of the Eremite or the Plaintative Hand plateau itself. As if he'd lived to see Jakku when it was once a verdant world with forests and water, lived to see the calamity he'd once spoken grandly of to the attentive recruits when he came to visit, the one that turned it into a barren globe of scorched badlands and marching dunes. As if he'd live to see it die for good.

Avoidant eyes, a shoulder twitch. Uncaring, almost, except for all the ways it wasn't.

He had a feeling this child understood the sentiment better than most.

"It can't, but it is. Counselor Rax _will_ die."

He still looked like he would cry.

He wasn't moving, or sobbing, or anything really. He was just unnaturally still as a natural wall, breathing a little too fast, attempting— _struggling_ —to keep composure.

If anyone else had spoken of the Counselor by _name_ in such a casual manner, whether including the title or not, he's certain he would've been scandalized. But _this child—_

This child was as memorable as the Counselor, in his own way, the same way the Commandant almost was. Carried the same remarkable remembrance, to be envied and feared: _red on gray._

Red like blood or sand on starship gray.

"What's your name?"

The Counselor hadn't mentioned it, today, when he'd told them all that from now on their master was this child. Today, when this child made Archex punch one of his own.

_(A part of him he struggled to suppress told him that, as ruthless as it had been, back at the Anchorite orphanage before he escaped from them, back before he'd been recruited, they would've never encourage him to do such a thing. They would've never cared enough to, and it'd been a mixed blessing—that they hadn't cared. It's how he'd gotten away with sharing his food, and lending blankets he'd never ask to get back.)_

This particular question seemed to bring him pause, if only for a moment. "Armitage…" Replacing the open hostility with a guarded sort of trust. "What's yours?"

It came abruptly, undefined, the memory of a prohibited kindness, something as meaningful yet simple as a glass of water.

The knowledge that he wasn't _Archex,_ anymore. Wasn't supposed to be, or so the Commandant said.

"Cardinal."

A scoff, then, far too bitter to have come from a child this small. A child this young.

"I asked for _your_ name. The one given to you, not the one you were unwittingly forced into."

He wanted to disagree. Wanted to lash out. To defend his name, defend the Commandant, to say _this_ name he'd been _given,_ that it was the first thing _anyone_ ever gave him.

_(Back in the orphanage, names weren't **given**. Not to the children left there that hadn't any. Those children named themselves, when they were deemed old enough to have the capacity for it, and even then they did so by choosing from a pre-selected list. He'd chosen his own without hesitation when prompted, as if it'd belonged to him from the very start, and the nurse woman who had offered him the list had seemed surprised—either by his speed or by the fact he'd chosen at all.)_

He wanted to say so many things about how important this one gift had been for him. About how thankful he'll always be to have it. About how someone like _this child,_ this _pampered brat_ who'd been given one from the very start, simply _wouldn't understand._

Yet he couldn't force even a single alternative response. Reluctant as he was to give it, the answer was dragged out of him anyway; tore from his throat by the order of someone else, someone older than them both by far. By the compulsion to always, unquestionably, _obey._

Who knew someone could give up so much, giving up a single word?

_"Archex."_

That young face like a monster's face turned fully towards him warped into the facsimile of a patient smile. A facade that was almost kind, but not quite. That was _trying_ to be.

Yet another expression he'd seen in the Counselor's face, even if only so genuine when directed at this child.

"I'll call you 'Ar." He proclaimed, quite the same way the Commandant— _his father_ —said _Your name is Cardinal_ , though sounding less solemn and much more cheerful. "It's the only thing both names have in common, so that way I'll be calling you both without calling you by either. Do you like it?"

He didn't have an answer to give, here, but he doubted one was expected of him.

Except the child was staring attentively up at him, his smile falling slightly to something smaller and more genuine, something almost compassionate, that _did_ reach his eyes.

"Don't worry," The child— _Armitage_ —reassured, as if his silence were answer enough to such an inquiry. Glazed over eyes flickering again to the setting sun. Narrowing. "There aren't any adults around. You won't have to hurt anybody yet, not again."

Then, before he could blink, he had arms wrapped around him and about thirty pounds of underfed ginger pile-driving into his chest.

"Wha—"

Surprise knocked the beginnings of a word out of him, like the squeak of a silent skittermouse snatched from the ground by a ripper-raptor, before the compulsion to _only speak when spoken to_ swallowed it up.

The redhead understood him perfectly, anyway.

"It's a hug." Armitage clarified, toneless but not harsh. Before every bit of instinct pounding in his ears could cry out that he'd been _right_ to be wary, to distrust. "I won't hurt you, either. I just—need one, now."

…Hugging is weird, he decided after a few seconds.

Weird, but—not so bad.

Or, at least not until he could discern the tip of a knife digging slightly into his back. Directly over one of few places where the armor didn't reach.

"I win!"

There was the laughter, again, now nothing but triumphant and cruel. But it died—was _suppressed_ —even quicker than before.

He felt it as every notion that had been knocked askew snapped firmly back into place.

"He—the Counselor, that's—"

"It was a parting gift." The knife receded, if only by half a millimeter. "He knew that without it I'd be easy prey, because once he— _once he leaves, once he's left behind too_ —I'll be alone. There'll be no one to keep the monster at bay, I'll be _alone._ I'm alone, I'm _alone—"_

The knife dug in, just a little bit, as the hand holding it shook.

Perhaps it'd been trembling all along, and he'd just been too panicked to notice, himself.

It didn't perforate cloth, didn't cut into skin. Even though it'd been offered the perfect opportunity to.

He'd seen it used, before. He knew from personal experience that this knife was rather sharp enough to kill.

"You're bigger and stronger than me, thought you could fool me, lure me into a false sense of security, but I _beat you to it;_ I've the advantage, _I win."_

There was the _laughter,_ nightmarish and the slightest bit unhinged when contrasted with the fierceness of the words.

"I know my father send you, he must've. After what I made you do you wouldn't have come on your own, you wouldn't have been so _nice_ to me."

There was the _dismay,_ again, the _despair,_ but it was being buried beneath layers of purpose.

"I should—I should _stab_ you, but—but if you don't move… if you _don't move,_ I won't hurt you."

It wasn't laughter, he realized with a pang of something akin to dread. It was made to _sound_ like it, certainly, but it wasn't _laughter._ The wetness of tears staining his armor, filtering within through the cracks and the creeks, gave that away.

This was _devastation,_ pure although well hidden. _Devastation,_ unveiling and unraveling, twisting into a helpless sort of rage.

"Why aren't you fighting? Why aren't you _running?_ Escaping, _leaving?_ Telling father what happened?!"

This child was _sobbing_ against his chest.

"Why _aren't you_ — _running, away!?"_

There was a _child_ sobbing against his chest, yelling, hiding there, grieving and helpless and six years younger. So he _disobeyed_ as he moved to wrap his arms around him, palms open and empty; on something like an _ingrained instinct_ that until then he didn't know he had.

The knife clattered soundly to the ground behind him with a cut short gasp, having shook itself out of a trembling hand. A hand out of two that dug fiercely into his back like a lifeline.

He didn't move, anyway.

"You're not alone."

He didn't leave.

* * *

… … … Somewhere Coursing Through The Unknown Regions - Gallius Rax's Personal Replica Of Emperor Palpatine's Imperialis, 03:38 AM Standard Time. 5 ABY, A Week After Armitage Hux Bore Hidden Witness To Gallius Rax's Death / A Week After The Day Rae Sloane First Saw Armitage Hux In Person … … …

* * *

"On your feet, soldier! I am here to propose a deal that might interest you."

"A deal?"

"An even exchange. Mutually beneficial." She clarified. "If you're willing to keep me safe from the other children, then I will keep you safe from your father."

"I _know_ what a deal is." The child in front of her snapped back, standing straighter than the cannon of a Star Destroyer and with the mildly condescending tone of a high-ranking officer discussing the going-ons of an uneventful shift. She hadn't woken him, he had already been awake. The red puffiness notable around his eyes made her wonder about the last time he'd slept at all. "And I'm afraid I must decline. You're going to leave, too. Everyone does."

"I am _not."_ She assured, equally as flatly but ten times more firmly.

"Oh, you won't _mean_ to." He conceded, matter-of-factly. Seeming bitter and pensive, the non-expression on his face reminiscent of a ghost's. Of a man she herself had killed. "Hardly anyone does, but people can't _choose_ when they leave, when they're _left behind._ And most can't choose _how,_ either." It reminded her of a small, smoke-grey single-serving image crystal: cold green pools of depth resembling unfeeling black shallow chasms far too much for her liking as they avoided hers and narrowed in thought. "I think I knew that already, but someone told it to me fairly recently, and I understand better now."

"Who?" She demanded urgently. Almost expecting him to stare at her as if gauging how much of a threat she'd become if he were to answer the question.

He didn't, of course, she was letting the familiarity get to her. He hid both hands behind his back and visibly closed off instead. Yet, faster than light travel, his eyes snapped back to hers.

"A good friend." He countered, defensively, rapid-fire. "Who was kind to me. Good at giving advice."

"They were wrong." She reassured. Sternly, fiercely. _He was wrong,_ she did not say, though she did want to. "Because _I_ won't leave."

"So you're the woman he spoke of then." The boy mused out loud. "The _remarkable_ one. The hero. The best and brightest, who could achieve even the impossible if she put her mind to it."

The child stared up at her for a few seconds, hands clasped behind his back. Evaluating. Still so decidedly, troublingly unchild-like. Seeming to find at the very least the traces of whatever he'd visually dissected her for. Something in his stance shifting subtly from hostile to trusting in a manner far too familiar for her to be comfortable.

She didn't like it. But it would have to do.

"Keep your end of the bargain, and I promise I _will_ protect you. Do we have an accord?" She asked, before it could occur to him to doubt again.

He nodded sharply, once. Uncombed red hair bristling like sparks from a firecracker.

"We'll see. What's your name, ma'am?"

"I'm Rae Sloane," she affirmed, the ghost of a smile to her tone. Despite everything, there was just _something_ about this child she couldn't help but like. "And that'd be Grand Admiral to you, scamp."

He had potential. She could see. His biological father had been right on that account at least. He just needed the right guiding hand to lead him along.

Her Order would need people like that.

"I'll keep you safe, I promise."

"I know you will." _He_ affirmed, confidently, simply. Catching her completely off guard. "You're honest. I've been told you'd never break your word."

* * *

**… … …** Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer Absolution, 11:59 PM Standard Time. 24 ABY, The Day Of The Reconvening **… … …**

* * *

He'd seen the schematics in Brendol's office, years ago.

It was simple enough in theory. Meant to force acceptance to the correct ways of thinking by rewarding it, and punishing a lack of it.

The Commandant said, conversational, that he'd likely never use it. He preferred far subtler, more effective methods. This was too aggressive and inhumane a re-education tactic; the subject would normally break in a matter of minutes, yes, but that's probably because their mind wouldn't be able to take it.

Armitage's screaming had lasted a matter of _days._

Even so, Cardinal had the sinking feeling it wasn't because he'd caved. The man hadn't a non-stubborn bone in his body.

It'd been nightmarish, echoing through the hallways of a semi-secluded sector of the medical bay that everyone else had been vetoed from approaching. Echoing out to the eerily emptied hallways around which no really _dared_ approach.

He'd tried to sleep, but it chased him all the way to his quarters and it wouldn't even let him lie down his head.

The Commandant had left for a reconvening with the new Supreme Leader that day.

He told himself it was justified. That it _had_ to have been justified. That there _had_ to be an explanation, a sufficient reason, that had put the Commandant in an obligation to do it. That the Colonel had been in a delicate state of mind as-is, and so he must have, somehow, _forced_ Brendol's hand.

Told himself he'd be disobeying direct orders from the man that had saved him in more ways than one, from the man that had raised him up to know better than this.

He went anyway, following carefully through deserted corridors the faded mental echoes of desperate calls for help like cautionary tales that had long since ceased.

His name had been called more than once, at first, when there had been a coherence to the screams.

Both of them had but, shortly before the coherence ceased, he'd heard much more of the first.

"Cover me, Iris." He commed to his most trusted, his only, droid. And so the security feed of the whole block went blank before it started playing on a loop.

* * *

**…** **…** **…** Somewhere In Orbit Over Parnassos' Most Radioactively Ravaged Continent - An Unassuming First Order Starship, 12:25 AM Standard Time. 24 ABY, An Indeterminate Amount Of Time After Armitage Hux Left Brendol Hux Stranded In Parnassos / The Day Armitage Hux Was Forced By A Very Public Very Much Registered Distress Signal To Pick Up Brendol And His Entourage From The Aforementioned Planet **…** **…** **…**

* * *

They'd left the planet behind.

They'd left the planet behind and were now back in orbit and _there was a woman there,_ when they left. And even though she hadn't been calling out for _him,_ her pleading tone was haunting still.

He'd made the mistake of speaking out of turn, just before they'd departed for the main ship. Couldn't help himself from stopping at the door and looking back at the carnage sprawled out all around on the very _grey_ sand as a thousand golden beetles mercifully ate the red from his vision. From reminding _the Commandant_ that there was _room,_ that anyone, _anyone_ under the correct circumstances could be useful.

That the woman so obviously carried within her the potential for yet another strong recruit for the Order, if her swollen stomach was anything to go by, and they wouldn't lose anything by _at least_ helping her get someplace where a civilian may receive attention and care for the particular brand of wounds this planet could inflict. It wouldn't even take them that much time.

He'd gotten backhanded by the man himself for his trouble. For all the good his carefully constructed arguments and thinly veiled pleas did him or her.

_The Commandant_ wouldn't tolerate an order being questioned, no matter how irrational or cruel.

_(Brendol Hux was **not** a General. He hadn't earned that under **her** and Hux did not plan on dignifying the stolen title by lieu of using it, not in his own head, not for as long as he could help it—)_

"Ow!"

Someone called out.

"Why are you squeezing so hard? What's happening?!"

And it awoke Colonel Hux from his bitter stupor because that was a _child_ calling out, and she was obviously in distress, and _what was his Father's new pet doing!?_

Well, they were clearly dazed, the figure within ill-fitting stormtrooper armor drawn tight over flashy red cloth so it almost appeared like the armor itself were _oozing freshbrightblood._ And if the spectacle he'd arrived in time to witness the grisly ends of was anything to go by, he couldn't blame them in the slightest. Perhaps the child was someone they knew, perhaps they might even be—however distantly—related.

Because they were making the classic mistake of _holding on too tight,_ like this frightened raven-haired golden-eyed little girl whose leathery furred clothing dwarfed her was the only thing they had left to lose.

Although, he mused then, perhaps she was.

Nevertheless, unable to stop himself, yet again he stepped in. Coming to stand directly beside them.

"We're going up into space, to become good soldiers for the First Order." For now, he ignored the escort and reassured the girl. Familiarly, cheerfully. "I was once very little and took a ride on a ship like this, and now look how big I am!"

He lost count of how many times he had said that first sentence, but it didn't, couldn't, matter right then. Instead, he pointed theatrically to his own chest—and his height was something he was proud of, something to _be_ proud of, and although much too worryingly thin he reassured _himself_ she might yet grow as freakishly tall as her unusual escort if fed properly—and smiled for the girl the Counselor's best smile. The one he'd borrowed and never got to give back, the one that looked kind.

His own wouldn't come to him right then, so Gallius Rax's would have to do.

_(He didn't, couldn't, dare to even think about trying to offer her **Rae** 's—)_

Later, he would notice the girl's escort shaking subtly like a leaf nearing a hurricane.

Later, a comforting hand would lie itself in solidarity of its own accord on the arm of what he would learn hours afterward was but a crying broken blonde woman when his father had turned away and a planet was being destroyed and a small figure hid behind her.

At some point, Brendol would leave, and his shoulders would sag and he'd finally feel like he could _breathe_ again.

Throughout it all, the grounding presence of his hand on her shoulder would never falter.

"Colonel Hux." He'd whisper to her then. The Counselor's smile still set firmly in place.

He wouldn't offer a first name. That choice had already been taken from him.

She wouldn't ask for one. Just take back the choice already taken from her.

"Phasma."

She didn't _need_ to ask, to know who he was. The hair and eyes, shape of the face, likely gave it away.

And, hopefully, Brendol had had the decency to explain surnames to her.

_(He hadn't thought to comment, at the time, on how the little girl's words had a different tilt to them yet the woman's accent was already so eerily like his, **so eerily like his father's** …)_

Admittedly mildly fascinated, he tilted his head a curious minutiae to have a partial view of the girl. "And the little warrior there?"

Behind her, the five going on six year-old girl stood somehow taller and yet shrunk into a kind of defensive stance all in practically a single movement. Even red-faced and blistered, as feverish with radiation poisoning as Phasma herself must have been, she would find a way to seem positively _fierce._

He flashed her a brand new encouraging smile because his old one had started to falter, almost as if expecting the subject of the conversation to offer up a name for herself.

By then, Phasma was already getting right back to blocking his line of vision. "She's no one—"

"Frey," her charge declared defiantly, quite at the same time.

If anything, the smile on his face grew in size with something resembling fondness and edging dangerously into stubborn determination. He'd raise his chin slightly so that he could see just over Phasma's shoulder, pointedly ignoring the woman's protective efforts to dissuade any kind of conversation.

"It is nice to meet you, Frey."

And then, as she herself would recount to him later, Phasma would feel abruptly like she was herding _two_ children.

_(…Years later, when she's in Starkiller Base as it crumbles staring straight through an identification picture of the man who opened the shields for the Resistance to get in without any kind of coercion and trying to decide whether it'll be worth it to risk her own skin trying to pursue whoever likely condemned the oldest of those children to an early death?)_

_(She'll **remember** this moment, and many more that came after, and many more than there **should** be. Gripping the console like a lifeline before taking what she'd need from it and then erasing every trace that it had ever been used.)_

_(And she'll run towards that man blaster at the ready give or take a millisecond's hesitation.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Situation - A distressed child is crying and clinging to you. How do you handle it?
> 
> Armitage Hux, a Colonel at nineteen, having _apparently_ forgotten what hugs are: *momentarily panics* What do I do with this? How do I make it stop? How do I make it let go of me?!
> 
> Archex / Cardinal, recently recruited at eleven, having _just_ been taught what hugs are: *paralyzes, then immediately cradles child close to chest and proceeds to tell them they're not alone*
> 
> Emotional intelligence, everyone. It varies.)
> 
> So, I adore Rae Sloane and I am not ashamed of it, but I am _so sorry_ Gallius Rax. We will see more of you yet but still. I love you and respect you more than that, and it was so NOT my intention to have you succumb to the average Mentor's occupational hazard.
> 
> When I was drafting the story I decided that I would leave the Canonical deaths I averted up to chance though, to ‘make it fair’, and so I rolled the dice on every character canonically destined to die whose death theoretically could be averted. I even broke my own rules and rolled three times for you Rax, _three_ instead of one. But you failed all three saving throws, the first with the lowest possible denominator. What even are the odds, SERIOUSLY *frustrated noises* the universe just hates you that much, sorry -- I'm finding a workaround.
> 
> (I rolled twice for Han, too. He failed the first rather spectacularly but recovered in the second with a perfect score, which, that was actually fairly in character of you Han. Leia passed too, on her first try. Guess even this way the universe is really biased towards Rebels and Force-sensitives in general. I apologize in advance Hux. This'll hurt me just as much if not more.)
> 
> As for Cardinal… well, the only thing I'm allowing myself to say about his segments not to spoil anything is that during the first meeting (that officially did not occur in previous Canon here, if you've read it you know the one) both he and little 'Tage were perfectly aware that he could overpower the later at any time once the ‘deception’ was revealed.
> 
> As you saw, Armie was actually COUNTING on that. In his mind, either Archex overpowered him and attacked him (unlikely) or overpowered him and fled (more likely), he didn't really care, he just wanted to be left alone so he could have a private breakdown and so continue trying to force time to a standstill and suppressing his emotions in peace (what a good dad Brendol was, teaching him to do that like a pro -- nice practice he made, good father material he was not). Which is why 'Tage almost outright _ordered_ Archex to flee from him at some point. (Just after ordering him not to move, because, well, he hadn't actually thought he'd be _listened to,_ when he said that.)
> 
> He of course failed to take into consideration: that he wouldn't be able to keep it all in for nearly long enough and panic, that he _did_ badly need a hug actually, and that he picked _Cardinal_ of all people to try and pull that move. Inherently good, kindhearted Cardinal. If the guy can empathize with BRENDOL HUX, he can empathize with a rock -- nevermind a crying, grieving, low-key heavily traumatized kid. I mean, he's biased and flawed as any other human being and in a pretty skewed specific direction to boot, but he was the younger troopers' ‘designated dad’ in Canon for a reason. (Seriously he handled this _way better at eleven_ than Hux did at freakin' _nineteen_ and I love him as a general rule, just as much as I love and cherish most every character here.)
> 
> Also, Phasma… *whistles ominously into the distance* oh, Phasma Phasma, when will we see you again I wonder… aaah, I love keeping my secrets close to my chest. Feels good, that there's so many.
> 
> Everything's coming together still~ *puppeteers all the variables from somewhere unseen, chattering all the while, halfway driving and half along for the ride*
> 
> …Read you people next week, hope you had a nice Xmas, cross your fingers for a new year ;3
> 
> As always, expect me to fix formating issues: some extra spaces that shouldn't be there, some that should but aren't, missing characters and the sort. So yeah peer editing abounds. This wasn't as ready as I would've liked to make it, but I gave myself a death-line because if not you'd never get anything, and today I had to pay my fee.


	6. Closing in (like the breeze at the edge of a cliff)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Present Date And Location:**
> 
> * * *
> 
> **… … …** Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer Finalizer, 01:00 PM Standard Time. 34 ABY, Official Firing Date **… … …**
> 
> * * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again! I've had a day like you would've believe. Something delayed me for a bit, concerning the fic, and no matter what I did _it wouldn't work_ \-- but I think figured it out, in the end.
> 
> Also, remember the ‘Poor Life Choices’ tag? _I_ remember the ‘Poor Life Choices’ tag. You'll get a bit more insight on why that's there, here ;3c
> 
> Ah WAIT! Read on please.
> 
> As always _mind the tags._ They'll be updated any day now. Also friendly reminder that here, we love and appreciate and cherish all Canon characters.
> 
> …Except Palpatine. F*ck Palpatine.
> 
> (And maybe Brendol Hux, but that has more to do with character bias and the fact pretty much Everyone™ but Cardinal dislikes him in-universe already… for various valid reasons at that.)
> 
> Also, in advance: don't hurt me *points towards the non-existent as of yet Next Chapter button* there be Kylo. It's just that when I was getting everything into a semblance of order and deciding what was relevant now, I realized that this two chapters _had_ to go first. So nope, you get told some plot important things early, to more efficiently pave the way. (You'll understand why I said this when you hit the end notes.)
> 
> I was not kidding when I said at some point that this fic is a monster, by the way. I told myself the limit for any all chapters _ever_ would be 14 thousand words at the most _and thankfully we're not there yet._ Still too close for comfort though, I took a calculated risk with the word count here but man am I bad at math. It just _doesn't feel right_ to end it anywhere else is all. I fully encourage you to eat a snack, drink some water maybe, and rest at the timeline page break of your convenience. There should be about three, I think, before we hit the end.
> 
> Alright, that out of the way, strap in for the long haul everyone cause this is gonna be a long one!

* * *

**… … …** An Outer Rim Mining Planet, 02:26 PM Standard Time. 19 ABY, Six Hours Into The Raid / Five Hours After Rae Sloane Promoted Armitage Hux Just As He Arrived To The Battlefield **… … …**

* * *

A Major belonging to the military autocracy which would not until much later years be known to the wider galaxy as the First Order stood nearly at the tip of a dark grey hill, relatively fresh from a well-earned promotion. Two figures clad in similar teal uniform to the left of him—the one directly beside him standing out with stark contrast due to its charcoal-black gloves—the only sign betraying the fact that he wasn't alone. Some distance behind him, the ruins of a manor slowly crumbling to pieces served as good a base of operation as any.

Of its own accord, his gaze wandered upwards to the irregular clouds of smog that towered far on the horizon like a setting black sun; an impenetrable wall of smoke encompassing practically the entirety of the skyline like the shadow of some obscured cephalopod poised just below the water level and ready at all times to strike. From up here and with the addition of an army, the illusion faded fast. The image of turbulent sea leaving once again grey sand with the makings of land, as if giant trails of ants were marching forth into the countryside

Bored and restless, Sol Rivas deserted from his previous menial task. He valiantly resisted the impulse to sweep a hand over his forehead to keep some unruly blond curls in check due to the damp climate and deliberately shifted his attention elsewhere again, instead deciding to check if the also newly appointed Colonel Hux's expression had changed any in the meantime.

It hadn't. Not a chance. Not a _millimetre._ The redhead's face remained frozen in a disapproving frown, lips pressed tightly together into a thin line.

Sol understood the sentiment. Or thought he did, at the very least.

What was so interesting about a thorilide cave, anyway?

_(Whatever it was, it certainly didn't feel worth any of **this**.)_

He peered back down at the battlefield, saw two soldiers sprinting _away_ from the enemy trenches—amid the blaster fire and AT-ATs and TIEs and unadulterated chaos—and zeroed in on that. There was another one left behind, he noticed immediately. Writhing in the ground screaming soundlessly, mask breached, hands scratching at the uniform's neck. Choking on the _artificially-produced_ poisonous fog when it caught up before the hired savages seared it the colour of fire as they shot mercilessly.

Sol looked away.

"The recent recruits are so pitifully weak," The _other_ ginger, another young Major—something-or-other Hassett—snarled, voice dripping with disdain, somewhere farther to his left. Pursing her lips and not bothering to hide it. "These NewRep scum are doing us a favour, if you ask me; rooting out the incompetents."

The Colonel glanced at her sideways like a lightning strike, moving only his eyes. His glare spoke volumes, but Hassett didn't care to pick up on that.

"They're not even New Republican thugs, Major Hassett." Sol conciliatorily made an admittedly futile attempt at a diversion, tacking on the honorific title out habit. "They're just some Black Sun opportunists."

"And how is that not the exact same thing?" She disputed, dismissing the whole debate with an exasperated huff. "They came here because the planet was undefended, because this rock is not a Core world and so rather than waste resources the New Republic left it that way. Either way, they're doing our job for us. Those who die here today were not worthy to carry on the legacy of the Order."

"Those who die here today are worth ten of you, then."

"Hux—" Sol's deft admonition came equally as automatic as the honorific, and went equally as unheard.

The other Major's icy glance shifted harshly from Sol to their mutual companion. "Excuse me?"

"Those people there, that you so mock, are willing to give their lives for what you believe in. They are _soldiers."_ The conviction there was palpable, thin and precise as a General's patience or the tip of a blade. "Not cannon fodder."

There was quite enough ice in the redhead's tone alone to freeze the entirety of the landscape and then some. Sol would've liked to see that, actually; something told him it'd hide the corpses better.

Sol's opinion of the Colonel went up a notch.

It tended, steadily, to do that; in the face of most other superiors—and not only where basic decency was concerned.

Still. He himself didn't feel like deciphering anything concerning his own thoughts on the matter. _(Nevermind his **feelings**. If you stemmed from the Order you were taught right from the start that those shouldn't play a part in proper decision making.)_

"We have our orders: orbital bombardment is imminent." Hassett's nose wrinkled sideways, attesting to her dissatisfaction towards the situation or her immediate superior, or quite more probably both. "We aren't allowed to interfere either way, _Sir._ Better the useless vermin than us."

Sol could see the Colonel's eyes narrow further, shining like someone lit up green fire from within; and _Oh, no, here we go again,_ some part of him whined half-heartedly. One that knew the expression quite well.

That? That was the _‘I have a plan’_ face.

When Colonel A. Hux wore that expression, the most appropriate response was: _Do I want to know?_

_(The usual answer to that inquiry happened to be: **You do and you will and you'll not dismiss me**. Sometimes verbatim. Most times heavily, heavily implied.)_

In the past several hours the Colonel—and Sol was definitely making a point of using the title—had withstood the poisoned air of this backwater wasteland without flinching, been ordered in no uncertain terms to craft a plan for the superficial bombardment able to minimize the losses in thorilide resulting from it due to being the only one sufficiently qualified in planetary sciences already stationed on the planet's surface _(the most sacrifice-able areas happened to be the least inhabited ones, but Sol was reasonably certain that that was merely coincidental gain, even if he **had** seen the preliminary before it was presented and neglected to mention, himself, the one or two populated areas that had been conveniently omitted)_ and been chastised for things that had occurred _before he'd even filled his station here._

Hassett must've, unknowingly, been the last straw.

"I'm going." Hux proclaimed, readjusting his teal overcoat with contrasting black gloved hands, and heedless of protest proceeded to turn around and march away.

And Sol?

"Going _where?"_

Sol did what he always did and went after, catching up fast, as heedless of Hassett's not dissimilar yet silent alarm as of the faint trail of lighter dust colored footsteps that they were both leaving behind.

"To the front." The intonation invited a perfectly quantifiable amount of zero discussion.

Not that Sol thought _this_ could be discussed. Until this planet he hadn't ever seen an ocean for himself, but he imagined trying to pull back the redhead when he'd decided on a course of action was very much akin trying to push back against the tide.

And yet, Sol followed as if swayed by it. For him, this was just what the universe boiled down to: Hux got fed up, this time with the needless loss and inefficiency, did something reckless, and Sol was there to minimize the damages. _Or, well,_ he consciously corrected himself in a quick mental backpedaling; _assure survival at the very least._

Gaining rapidly on the redhead's head start, he closed in on Hux. Closer, really, than he'd dare to be to any other superior officer. Keeping up step by step. Raising an eyebrow and lowering his voice as if he were again just a boy at the improvised Academy gossiping with a classmate.

"Care to share?"

This blatant act of familiarity and thereby insubordination towards the other's higher rank would've likely gotten him shot, were he talking to anyone else.

Hux just kept walking, eyes stuck to the crumbling manor. "We're in Arkanis." The redhead said, as if that clarified—nay _justified_ —the blatant disobedience of a superior officer's orders. No matter how unreasonable. "In case you hadn't noticed."

The natural neutrality was strained, today.

Sol's concern rose slightly, but nothing near the danger zone yet.

"So?" He asked.

 _"So."_ Hux answered, rather firmly, fists further tightening at his sides.

Now, Sol had the _fortune_ of growing up in the uncharted regions of Unknown Space; which meant in this comparatively short lifespan he had gotten around to experiencing he had seen everything from geomagnetic anomalies and slashing plasma winds to terrible nebula storms and gravity wells.

Having faced military indoctrination and imminent starvation at the tender age of— _he wasn't counting actually,_ there were nevertheless few stranger sights among those the universe saw fit to throw at him than that of a monosyllabic Hux.

His mind chose precisely that moment to remind him just how tense the Colonel had carried himself since they'd seized the manor; the way his hair practically stood on end like the fur of a hissing rada-cat and all his muscles had been wrung tighter than the bolt at the end of a taut wire since they'd been deployed here in the planet, only exacerbated by their orders changing from providing reinforcements to staying put _standing idly by_ while civilians hid and allies fought unknowingly awaiting their imminent demise—

His mind chose that exact moment to make the necessary mental leap to the historical records.

Location. Occupation. Surname.

Arkanis. Academy. Hux.

"Oh."

The younger Hux let out the cut-short beginnings of a strangled laugh. Given the ambient, it camouflaged well as a cough. "Yeah, _oh."_

They were now rapidly approaching the manor. The _Hux_ manor, his brain was quick to fill in the gap of information for him. The redhead's likely childhood home ravaged by nature and people alike. Whatever was left of the historically praised Hux Estate.

He felt like whistling and suppressed a sympathetic wince. _(Nobody wanted to see their homeland in such a state. He would know.)_

Part of him wanted, irrationally, to put a hand to the man's back and pat it. And then just kind of leave it there.

As it was, he risked moving a step closer in mutually understood moral support.

"You are enlisting the Captain, I assume."

It wasn't a question, not really.

The redhead nodded anyway.

"You assume right, I am."

This was _still_ a gross violation of protocol, and a massive show of insubordination at that.

"You aren't going to tell him the details are you?"

"No, I am _not."_ The redhead readily confirmed.

 _Good,_ Sol thought. In an organization like the Order, plausible deniability was _everything._

Plausible deniability, he pondered then, which _he_ no longer held.

Not that that would be enough to make him hesitate any.

He nodded back his approval. "So what's the plan, then?"

The Colonel's answer was a deadpan monotone. Never once breaking stride nor making eye contact. "Bold of you to assume there is one."

It might be poor timing of him to realize this anew, but Sol Rivas appeared to have a rather crippling weakness specific to redheads.

"You're _you._ " He smiled, unable to contain himself. _"Of course_ you have a plan. You wouldn't be moving otherwise. Knowing you, you probably invested all the time bought for us thus far by this whole farce of a battle into crafting it."

It wasn't the hair color, it was the crazy.

"The Commandant won't approve." The younger Hux proceeded to point out, glancing tellingly at Sol's newly minted patch denoting recently acquired rank.

"Bold of you to assume I could care less." Sol waved him off with the arm that same patch was attached to. "If we weren't in _polite company_ right now, I'd tell you exactly where the Commandant can shove his disapproval."

 _Though,_ he thought then, _it might just be this one particular redhead._

"The battle is at a standstill. We need to seize the moment." Said redhead stated. "I've been thinking—"

And with an opening like that, Sol could not possibly restrain himself. "The galaxy had better look out."

If any of his fellow junior officers had seen him then, _teasing a direct superior,_ they would've pronounced him dead on the spot.

Hux, in stark contrast, pointedly let it slide with nothing but a verbal warning and without so much as a by-your-leave. "I've been _thinking—"_

 _And stars have mercy;_ Sol quipped, but did not say. Because, for all that he took some liberties here and there, _there were limits_ —and speaking out of turn again might've net him something worse than the famed Hux glare, which was already pretty bad in the sense that it made you feel like an insect stuck to a wall on a series of pins and somehow it just got worse over the years.

Besides, Hux was right. Every second dabbling here was a second wasted.

"…Although what I have in mind is unconventional, it won't make for a worse assault at least; conserving forces and saving potential recruits." The Colonel mused out loud, rapid-fire. "No need for orbital bombardment, no unnecessary harm to the civilians, nor any more damage to the thorilide supply. We'll win early too, that ought to appease the old monster."

It sounded _reasonable._

Which was exactly why not many who really knew the man would've willingly gone along with it.

Colonel A. Hux, in Sol's humble opinion, possessed the enviable ability to make the craziest of feats sound reasonable.

_…Might indeed just be this one particular redhead._

Because Hux, Sol thought, was a man of ideals. The right kind. The most dangerous kind.

The kind of man who'd torch the whole galaxy if he thought it was right.

"Tempting fate now, aren't we Colonel?" Sol could only be thankful that it hadn't yet— _wouldn't ever_ —come to that. "Just know that at this rate—"

"Let me guess, Rivas: I'll be the death of you?"

His own expression of friendship mirrored only in tone, Sol's grin turned a little strained at the apt interruption.

"Someday soon, I fear."

_Oh you have no idea, Huxley._

They were currently approaching the entrance, still no one potentially dangerous within hearing distance, and the mild return of verbosity on both sides of the conversation was dearly appreciated. Which was odd, because Sol knew people who would've actually _paid credits_ to see this man shut up.

Then again, as it were, Sol did not particularly _like_ any of those people.

"Now to look for Cardinal and let's go find those kids, shall we Major."

"Right behind you, Sir."

"Going anywhere without me?"

The playful inquiry came from behind them. Hassett.

Hux half turned just to raise a skeptical eyebrow at her, tone scatting.

"Didn't _we have our orders?"_

When Sol turned too she was, rarely, grinning in the sort of resigned professional exasperation of someone who had willingly put up with something for a very long time. Watching it unfold from a distance, suddenly tiring of remaining merely an spectator.

"We do." She started easily, almost conciliatory, as she was coming to step between them just as they arrived at the door. Facing Hux as she spoke and thus rudely leaving Sol to face the back of a teal hat crowned by a lovely ginger ponytail. "Don't get me wrong, I don't much exactly like you. But believe it or not I don't like this any more than you do, and I've been told your plans tend to work better when under pressure."

Sol couldn't help his own incredulous huff. "You're helping?"

She shook her head at the mere suggestion, an ambiguous gesture standing proudly somewhere between amusement and contempt. Her lips were as red as her hair, and still warped in a grin that reminded Sol oddly of the fanged mouth with rows upon rows of _too many teeth_ that had jumped up at him from the _too-dark too-still_ waters below just on the opposite side of the manor where the hill cut off abruptly into a cliff before Hux threw him backwards by the back of the uniform's neck and called him an idiot for getting that close to the edge in the first place, his own rising nausea concerning the grim turn of the situation rapidly devolving inside his old childhood home be damned.

That Arkanisian ashen white shark had had its work cut out for it, forced to venture somewhere else in search of its next meal.

This one though—she had her eyes locked straight on him.

"Wouldn't dream of it, boys." She didn't offer something as undignified as a shrug, but it was a near thing. The door opened just as she sent them a wink. "Go out back and find your Captain for that. Convince everyone else or leave empty-handed with only the blasters tied to your side. Either way? I'm just the distraction."

Then, tipping her hat, she was off.

They did find the Captain out back. Once she gave them the all-clear.

They left soon after, together with a small trusted team right behind them. More than two dozen people, that Sol was able to count, but no more than thirty.

Most of them tagged along willingly whilst likely knowing they were disobeying direct orders. The Captain—well, the Captain never did ask many questions, now that Sol took the time to dwell on it. Something mutually understood by everyone was that they might not come back.

Of the leading officers, only Captain Cardinal and Sol would exit those caves early, after neutralizing an important target followed by hours and hours of search after search. Begrudgingly convinced to, yet despite the growing risks of remaining nearby—even aboveground—neither one very willing to let the place fall far behind them.

"…You two should stay with the others." Hux had said, ever the _practical_ voice of reason, just after having clinically summarized everyone else's own objective value in accordance to current circumstances. "We've been here long enough our source of breathable air is stretched thin as-is, the group needs directions and the potential recruits—the _kids_ —need all the protection they can get. The air masks here are inefficient for a reason, to make them rely on their captors. They burn through the chips too fast and we don't have enough replacements, ours are better but incompatible with theirs anyway and that makes about half our supply useless. There's too many and they're also burning through vital resources they can't exactly replenish as we speak and so we can't risk them staying here for longer than they need to either. We got lucky to find spares for them earlier, _we can't have anyone running out here."_

_(They did find many, but **they hadn't found them all** , and Hux wouldn't settle for that. Wouldn't settle for anything less than perfect. Wanted to go deeper, keep looking—right under the impact core of what he himself had earlier called the nearest **blasting zone** , once the order was given. And their team together with all the children they'd already found, and Sol and 'Ar, would've just weighed him down.)_

"…This was my idea in the first place, I have the most air filtering chips left even leaving most for the group, I can reliably defend myself. The probability that the stragglers would approach one person instead of a large group is reasonably higher and without access to another map anyone else would get lost. I'm the only one here able to find the way out on my own—who did you think crafted the map that we've been referencing thus far? _I_ need to do this," he said, _"I have to."_ And Sol believed him, because _that was Hux._

Sol only ever saw the certainty. No room for second guessing. No assurance he'd be fine, just the conviction.

"You can't intend to save everyone. Do everything right." The Captain told him solemnly. "Not on your own. Not always."

Sol didn't even bother. The only one who could ever change Hux's mind was Hux himself and it was a long and painful process.

"I know—I can still bloody well try though. That's not even the point, the point is we have time, _someone should keep looking_ and this is risky enough that the only reasonable way for it to be worth it is if I do it on my own. I'll catch up before the fireworks start; nobody knows these tunnels like I do."

That said, he seemingly considered the conversation finished. He was already turning away when Sol shouted after him. "Where are you going?!"

"To find the one who fled from us earlier, they shouldn't be far. Take care of the others Captain, Major. I'll rejoin you later, don't wait around for me, that is an order."

_(Sometimes, not always but there were days when **sometimes** , Sol really did dislike Hux.)_

"We need to comm the Grand Admiral." The Captain tells Sol, later, when they're both leaning back against a light grey building out of many to keep from being seen. He'd risked taking the helmet off to reassure the children at some point but now he'd gone right back to wearing what Hux calls his _garish red monstruosity_ and Sol didn't have a clue in his tone to guess at what expression might lie beneath. "She's—he's her Attaché, she'll want to know."

"Way ahead of you, 'Ar." Sol ignored the discomfort, already taking out his comm device and turning the opposite way to hail the Eclipse, mostly because the light blue hologram-thin energy-shielding air mask was awfully transparent even as it was flashing red in shrill low oxygen filtering capability warnings and he didn't know what face he himself might be making.

The comm pings unassuming acceptance. The call goes through. Somewhere behind them, as if on cue, something collapsed with a resounding _bang._

…Should've dragged him out of there when they had the chance.

* * *

**… … …** Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer Absolution, 00:29 AM Standard Time. 24 ABY, The Day After The Reconvening **… … …**

* * *

_"…Armitage—"_

_"Don't call me that!"_

"Armitage, please, just—I'm begging you, stay still—!"

"I am fine, _Captain._ Your assistance is no longer required."

"No longer—you're shaking and shivering and _bleeding_ all over, for goodness'—"

"Your concern, however late it might've come, is duly noted and immeasurably appreciated. Now _leave me alone._ You are remarkably good at that—unhand me!"

"I'm sorry."

"That was an order."

"I know—"

"I'm well within my rights to shoot you."

"I know."

"…You have nothing to apologize for, truly. It was my fault, getting myself caught in the first place, for being naive enough at first to think that anybody would listen—Captain _that hurts—!"_

"I'm sorry, Armitage, I didn't think that he—"

_"I know._ It doesn't change much of anything however. Feel like a battered pincushion, my ribs are in pieces and every patch of skin four shades of purple deep and you're currently squishing them together, not to mention the _electricity_ —who gave you permission to move?"

The back of the mess of a man he'd plastered to his chest had gone painfully rigid before it forcibly relaxed as they talked. Went stiff with child-like alarm all over again when Cardinal started to back away, somehow even more when the Captain automatically halted the motion.

Truthfully the gesture had been less an impulsive burst of fraternal protectiveness and more a plot to successfully immobilize him, but Cardinal assuaged his conscience with the fact that at least this way the redhead wasn't reopening any more injuries.

He readjusted his hold to more efficiently support another person.

"Do you think you can walk?"

"I think I don't look nearly pathetic enough for you to be asking me that question."

_That is a matter of opinion, Colonel._ Cardinal thought, but did not say.

"Very well, then. Hang on—Huxley. We're getting you out of here."

Without further ado, he helped the man stand up from his sitting position in the visitor's chair next to the medical bed—purposefully ignoring how long it took and how much said help was so obviously required—and they started walking step after stubborn step. Each reverberating in the lonely silence and giving the place a dreary feeling of abandonment.

The Colonel was making an active effort not to ever falter, and Cardinal readjusted his arm's position beneath the Colonel's own yet again when he took notice to more fully take on the brunt of walking. That he did not get called out for this or ordered to desist was almost more concerning in and of itself than if the redhead _had_ actually faltered.

The old Academy nickname hadn't elicited as strong a response as any variation of that first name. As any of his other attempts at communication thus far. Cardinal noted this as they crossed the door when it'd opened automatically for them, between one step and another, and faintly wondered why that was.

"…I really am sorry."

"You did eventually arrive. It's more than most anyone else did."

"Whatever you did that prompted this, for the sake of my sanity, never repeat it."

"Don't worry, 'Ar. I learn the lessons stemming from my mistakes. I'll just make sure no one can prove anything next time."

Cardinal couldn't contain the irritated sigh _that_ particular response elicited. He'd wish he had, a second later.

"Sol was right, why do I even try?"

"Because you're _Father's favorite._ You're not just another soldier, another student. You can afford to try, at this point it comes with the job description. He wouldn't demote _you._ He wouldn't almost kill _you_ for stepping out of line, even if the line has all but been erased."

"…What _did_ you do?"

"If I told you there would be no point in trying again, now, would there?"

He was sneering, as he said that, the grim grin in his face more of a grimace.

Cardinal knew not to take it personally; this sneer was just the face the Colonel showed everyone.

Even if it weren't, that the redhead was forced to lean against him simply to be able to walk one blissfully deserted corridor couldn't have been doing the overall mood any favors.

The expression's apparition was almost comforting in its familiarity, when compared to the blank, utterly emotionless _nothing_ from before.

At least he was _coherent,_ now.

"We need more bacta patches. Scratch that, you need a bacta tank."

"What I need is to get out of here, sooner rather than later. Might even stop the developing phobia."

"I've no idea how you can _joke_ about this, though come to think of it you do have a rather worrying sense of humor."

"Who said I was joking?"

"We'll need to find you a new uniform, Colonel. This one—"

"Too many tears, I know."

"I think anyone with eyes would know."

"Next time I'm being tortured for information I'll tell the torturer to be more mindful of the fabric, Captain."

"At least it's black."

"So you won't have to see the red? One'd think _you_ would like the colour."

Cardinal ignored the usual verbal jabs with a practiced ease. All things considered, this once he probably deserved them.

"Come to think of it you're not wearing it now. The armour. Why, don't feel very special?"

"Too eye-catching. Distinctive. As I was saying, we should stop by the officer quarters—"

"Don't bother, Captain. I don't have another coal grey uniform; you'll have to request a spare. The Commandant's protocol droid should help, always did with the bruises, before."

"No. I don't trust it. I'll comm Iris; she will help, although frankly I don't see why—"

"Everyone else stopped wearing them. And it hasn't even been a year yet. Just because you forgot so soon doesn't mean I will."

"The Grand Admiral's—"

A cruel laugh, cut short, echoed menacingly through the walls.

"What baggage did they even feed you?"

"Excuse me?"

"The official story. I assume the Commandant told it to you."

"It was an accident, Armitage. I'm quite certain we were _both_ told that. What happened to the Eclipse was—"

"Unavoidable. Unpredictable. Unpreventable. Of course _he_ 'd tell you that, why wouldn't he?"

"What are you—you're in no state to stand on your own—!"

"Riddle me this, Captain."

The shadow of a man leaned sideways against the doorframe of the mechanical doors to the next hallway not to fall just as they opened with an echoing hiss. Leaning a little too hard. Breathing a little too fast.

"How does _‘an accident’_ not only cripple but _eviscerate_ an average Star Destroyer—nevermind a kriffing _Star Dreadnought,_ in close enough proximity to the fleet might I add that receiving a distress signal wouldn't be a far-fetched possibility—in a through enough way so as to leave no survivors?"

That familiar green gaze was sharp, almost too sharp, but that worryingly blank neutrality was back. This time broken by a hint of hatred. A far more defined and directed version of that same single-minded focus from Arkanis and that helpless sort of rage from so many years ago.

"No guesses? None? It's fine, I'll answer for you: _I was there._ When it happened. And I assure you, that? Wasn't an accident."

The last time something like this had happened, as a child the man in front of him had lashed out to anyone and anything for a long time because he hadn't had a target for that anger to be unleashed upon.

Cardinal didn't know what would happened if he gained one. The younger Hux didn't deal well with grief. Not grief of this kind.

"Colonel Hux—Armitage, what did you _do…?"_

"Failed spectacularly. Broke an old promise. Compromised a very important mission. Confirmed something I've been suspecting since I was fifteen, while I was at it; it was merely too little too late."

* * *

**… … …** Western Reaches of the Inner Rim - Jakku, 01:10 PM Standard Time. 28 ABY, The Day Of Ben Solo's Fall To The Dark Side / Two Months After Brendol Hux's Death And Approximately Two Years Too Early For It **… … …**

* * *

The man had been standing there immobile for quite a while.

She couldn't put her finger on it, but there was something odd about him. Something that stood out.

It wasn't the imposing, overly formal uniform shining like black sun-blasted glass; through that made him stand out plenty already against the pale gold of the sands scattered around them by the strong winds that for him seemed so easy to ignore.

It wasn't even the bright red hair, a feature she hadn't ever glimpsed before on anyone else—surprising, as she'd seen her fair share of colourful people throughout her life. Wasn't even the fact he was standing stiff at the edge of a cliff just staring out at some distant point she couldn't see, hidden from his range of view as she wanted to remain. Or the fact that simply seeing him had made her stomach upset and her throat dry with a pang of distrust and something like disgust.

It was the way his figure seemed fuzzy, almost blurring around the edges. The way something about him, even through that really bad feeling simply staring at him gave her, made her want to observe him from closer still. To take an even bigger risk.

Whatever it was it beckoned her, like a moth to a flame. It was strange. Strangely curious, too. Like seeing two holographic images but at the same time: one superimposed over the other.

If she thought too deeply about it, the feeling went away and she realized she'd actually lost his trace in the desert a while back, like many people and ships and animals are lost. Realized that, as with the many moments in the past when she herself had gotten lost, she didn't even know what it was that brought her here; what it was that made her feet move to an unknown destination as if stuck in a trance.

But if she didn't focus on it and instead let it wash over her she was struck by the notion that she'd come here because there had been _something, someone here_ that a force within her told her _didn't belong._

Not here. Not now. Just— _not,_ in as broad terms as she dared to think.

"You must've tired of dogging my steps; you've been lagging behind, the last two kilos." There was no feeling there, in that voice, and she realized that—maybe for the same reason she felt so distrustful—she hadn't really expected there to be any. "You can come out now. I promise I won't hurt you."

She didn't move a muscle. Didn't dare breathe.

This had been a bad idea.

"I can see your shadow peeking out slightly from the edge of that rock." He went on with an added gentleness, though she had been _certain_ he hadn't so much as glanced her way. "Credit where credit is due, it almost coincides perfectly. In fact, the disturbance is far too small when compared with its size for you to be much older than twelve, even with the present position of the sun. And that's if you're both human and crouching, which I should sincerely hope is the case."

She flattened herself more against her scalding hiding place, contemplating his words. Purposefully ignoring the places where the contact stung until her back went numb.

After a suffocatingly long pause, he continued.

"I don't know why you've been shadowing me, and I doubt you'd be liable to explain."

She could only assume he'd resumed dutifully watching that one point in the horizon, in fitting imitation of a neighbor of hers from the Goazon Badlands. Her conjecture was proven right when she silently stood up and stealthily advanced, facing his back like a pole-snake coiled to strike.

"Come on out, or don't." Perhaps not realizing this, he kept going, still in that same matter-of-fact even tone. "Whichever way it might be, you needn't worry about my presence. I'll be resuming my journey soon, so you could wait in this hellish sun until I take my leave or you could leave now and save us both the trouble. Or…" He tacked the last word on almost sharply, half-turning to grin something fierce and triumphant at her. As if he'd won a game she wasn't even aware they'd been playing all along.

"I could approach you." She warily finished for him, halfway on her way to doing just that without quite meaning to.

"Indeed you could." The man turned completely towards her, tilting his head to the side in an inquisitive gesture; observing her the analytical inoffensively curious way she'd seen nightwatcher worms stare at her, at times. Seeming once again overtly neutral as he assessed just how much of a threat she could possess. Though something in her gut told her this man, just like those nightmarish creatures, was anything but inoffensive. "And you _chose_ to, which I've found is rather rare, here."

He reminded her of a teedo. Mysterious and vague, acting eerily as if he knew something no one else did. Any energy he might've had was seldom wasted, every movement firm and efficient and bleeding with _purpose._

From a distance his inner light had been faint and guarded, like many of the people's she'd met here, but even so there had been something strange and— _offbeat_ about it. It felt like watching the shards of that one power cell she'd shattered accidentally the one time as they scattered throughout the sideways floor of her tipped AT-AT. Like the edges were too sharp yet vague, shimmering with the remains of energy unseen, liable to cut him as well as anyone else. Hard to concentrate or look upon, and if she focused too hard just about anything could creep into her vision at any moment.

Yet something within her also, in complete contradiction of her gut feeling, told her to _trust_ him. Even though it seemed like the most unnatural thing to do.

This guiding force had yet to steer her wrong though…

So she did.

She took a step closer, and then another. She was still more than five steps from him. Even accounting for superior speed and longer strides, it'd take him a while to catch up if she ran.

She'd have already disappeared by then. He was an outsider while she'd already spent more than half her life here. Surviving instead of living.

The locals had ways to learn how to dissolve along the sands, and if she'd wanted to survive, she'd had to learn the same.

"Why did you come here?"

The question found its way out of her mouth before she was conscious of asking it. Before she knew she'd spoken at all. Yet there was still that same feeling from before, like a whisper in the wind.

_(You **shouldn't be** here, it said. You **don't belong** here.)_

He should be out there, something foreign snarled from within her. Up, away; in space where her parents had gone. Why _did_ he come here? Why did _anyone_ come here? If they didn't _belong,_ if they didn't _have to,_ obligated by fate or circumstance or both?

This place is nowhere. Nothing is here. Everyone on this world is a ghost: purposeless, lost.

_If he's here,_ she thought, _he might be a ghost too._

He merely shrugged, gaze snapping back to the horizon for a fleeting second as if startled—or guided—by a passing thought of his own. The outwardly friendly attitude was long gone, replaced by something else. A frown far too neutral, and more closed off by the second. "Believe it or not, you could say I came to visit a friend."

She scoffed, quite without meaning to also.

"A friend?"

Hardly anybody had _friends_ in Jakku. Nobody from these parts, that she knew of. Much less from outside; people with purpose, places to go, they didn't _belong_ —so they didn't stay long. This was the first time she'd heard much of contact with the outer galaxy beyond the clouds if you didn't count the occasional scoundrel sauntering by Plutt's place.

And she doubted any of _them_ could be somebody's friend.

Though, by a note to his voice that could've and would've been a quiver, in anyone else's, she caught on to the fact that perhaps the person he'd come to visit was no longer _here_ at all.

"You could say." He echoed, like a sort of malfunctioning droid stuck on one directive.

But surely that couldn't be _all_ there was to it, was there?

She hadn't much of any experience with his type—the military type—but he didn't seem of the ilk of beings motivated by nostalgia or personal attachment alone. Love, least of all.

"You misjudge me."

Her thoughts sputtered to a halt.

He'd countered her argument without even being privy to it.

Distantly, she noticed that whatever brought her here had propelled her two whole steps forward without consulting for her approval, and she halted physically too. Planting her feet and pressing her knees hard against the stone beneath the sand, so exposed now she was closer to the edge, to prevent herself from doing it again.

_(How had the wanderer put it? **Perch like a vworkka, patient and still.** You are no skittermouse. You are not prey. Don't act like it.)_

She held her head up, tightening her jaw, and tried to keep her eyes on him—as she would when faced with a threat—instead of on the ground or the horizon or anything but.

His light was over-bright. Almost blinding. Its appearance had been deceiving, she felt like she was staring at the _sun._ It shone so dizzyingly from up close, as if destructive in its brightness, that when she blinked contrasting colors left shimmering afterimages behind.

Normal people didn't _glow_ this bright. Some people in Jakku barely glowed at all.

"Don't bother denying it. It's written all over your expression that you don't believe me, and I don't fault you for it." The grin was back, though it seemed almost sheepish now. More of a smile, with that new layer of self-depreciation to it. "I'd say I approve, actually. Blindingly going around trusting strangers is a good way to wind up all the worse for wear, at the best of times. Though in my experience I've been doing so semi-successfully with mixed results for most of my life, so I suppose I wouldn't happen to be the appropriate person to point that out."

"Your friend," she said, and wasn't it _strange_ , to think a man like this would have _friends._ "Who were they?"

It wasn't a question as much as a demand.

If there was even the faintest possibility he'd known her parents—

"That doesn't matter." He brushed her off. Perhaps harsher than he'd meant to, judging by the way his voice smooth over after. She was about to ask again, to demand an answer, before her fleeting hopes were shattered too. "He's been gone for a long time now. I suppose I came, proverbially, to properly bid him goodbye and—" Another shrug, less casual now, almost guilty. "You're right, there _is_ another reason."

She knew it. "Why _did_ you come here, then?"

"To recover something. Something I lend him. Something I lost." There was the smile again, fleeting, though she became aware then that it wasn't much of a sincere smile at all. It disappeared as soon as it came. "Or, well, a half of it anyway. I've had the other half with me since—quite a while too. There's the starmap also; I do believe my reasons for stopping by should be all the same to you however." He appeared thoughtful anew, though it was only given away by the manner his fist clenched reflexively against his chest reminiscent of a salute. She wondered if he was aware he'd positioned it there at all. "Still. It's a sight to behold, even broken as it is, would you like to see it?"

The offer of goodwill was unexpected, as was the way he crouched slightly, repositioning his bag against his shoulder, and beckoned her forward with his left hand—the same that had been clad against his chest—as if she truly were a frightened skittermouse.

She had half a mind to act like one and scamper off.

"…Show it to me." She found herself saying instead, hesitantly, her own hand tense where it'd reached out backwards to grip her quarterstaff.

But she made no effort to move in either direction yet.

"Fine," he seemed unbothered by her wariness. Understanding of it, even, while he took off one of the gloves and swiftly put it in a coat pocket for what she assumed to be more deft coordination as his right hand reached for his left sleeve to take something hidden beneath the fabric of the massive coat. It came off with a barely audible click. "Have it your way."

She would've thought he'd take whatever it was out of his black, professional military looking bag—or from some pocket or another. A coat sleeve was an interesting place to conceal something.

When she saw what it was though, she couldn't help but gasp.

"Beautiful, right?"

He was grinning again; remarkably smug about her stunned reaction, but she didn't care.

In his hand there sat a small blue sphere: a marble, she realized, probably a jewel of some sort though it _seemed_ common enough a bauble from her present distance.

Without caring enough to realize, she closed a fair trek of said distance to take a closer look at the shiny relic contained within that hand.

"What is it?"

"A blue stone." He said, with a hint of humor to it that she couldn't miss but couldn't really interpret either. "A mineral of some kind at least. To tell you the truth: I haven't the faintest idea. The ship's computer went haywire, the first and only time I tried to scan it."

There was a story there. She didn't know what to make of that, but she _didn't care._ She didn't know what it was, but something about that pebble _called_ to her, the same way the presence of the man himself had.

His inner light had been pretty, even from afar. Ever-changing. Kaleidoscopic, almost. But the stone in his hand _felt_ —

"It…" _it felt_ — "it feels _alive."_

Like a heart, somehow. From this close, she could almost feel it beating, and the relentless sunlight didn't so much reflect off of it as it appeared to be _absorbed._ If she stared at it for long enough she could swear the brilliant light blues had depth and they were shifting, as if reflecting the movement of clouds in some out-of-reach sky.

But, from this close also, she could see quite clearly the dark line that divided it at the middle. The line that didn't spell _death_ as much as it did _divide._

"It's broken."

"That it is." The man simply nodded, and she hadn't even realized she'd talked out loud or how close she'd gotten until then. "I do believe you were forewarned of it." He casually pointed out as she backpedaled one hurried step.

He smelled almost overly clean, she noted faintly through her clouded panic. Crisp. Of expired antiseptic maybe. Reeking sterility and stale air like a life-long spacer in a similar way her parents had.

His strange uniform was almost obsessively put together and what little skin there was to see was unmarred, if sporting an unhealthy pale, except for the angry pink lines of old cuts decorating his hand in a chaotic pattern. As if he'd once clutched broken glass and the scars wouldn't let him forget that mistake.

She herself was tan from the merciless sun. Dust-cheeked and unkept and infused with the scent of burnt clay, as were many of the people here in Jakku. But she didn't have any scars, not any as obvious, not any as visible.

Branded now and forever by the roughness of this place though, that she was, perhaps the same way space had left its contrasting brand on him.

They weren't so different, she realized. A rough environment had shaped them both equally.

He'd told the truth, too, and seemed almost as mesmerized with the stone as she was as he separated both perfect halves with his thumb into two sides that seemed almost like buttons. For her, it felt incomplete. As if someone had taken one of both moons from the sky.

And yet…

"Can you give it to me?"

The question startled him into looking up from it and back at her. Both his auburn brows furrowed. His eyes were almost the same teal as the stone in his hand, in spite of the distinct grey-green tint to them. _"Give it_ to you?"

"Just let me take a look at it, it…" She didn't know how to explain this. She'd never known, really. "I think, I think it _wants_ me to."

There was the smile again. Almost blinding too. Fake or not, it was very convincing, and the earnest understanding within certainly felt real. "Well, if that's what it wants, I suppose I _could_ give it to you."

"I don't want it." She was quick to say, though perhaps that was a lie. The truth was rather that _it_ didn't want her. "Not permanently." Either way, she couldn't shake the feeling that this man needed it much more than her. "It'll just be a moment."

The man raised an eyebrow. In piqued interest or suppressed amusement, or a combination of the two. It might've been something else entirely, she couldn't tell. "Suit yourself, I suppose."

The hesitant pause after his words was barely noticeable, and there was no lag to his motions at all. He extended his hand slightly towards her, she put hers beneath it. Catching on fast to her intentions he let both pieces of a whole drop wordlessly into it with an amount of trust she hadn't thought anyone capable of anymore. Not since the last scavenger kind enough to offer the others some sort of shelter from a sandstorm on relative short notice had been killed in his sleep.

She'd liked talking to them because, although she couldn't understand a word of what they said, just like her they had craved companionship yet hadn't been big on physical contact.

She didn't think this man was big on physical contact, either.

She could've tried to run off with the stone, she was well aware, but instead she pushed both sides together and as if magnetized they fit just as perfectly as when the man had first shown them to her.

She enclosed the perfect sphere whole in her hands. Cradled it close. It was small enough to fit comfortably into her palm but it felt eerily like holding a beating heart. Still pumping even after being carved out from a heaving chest.

Breathing in, feeling the dirt underneath her shoes and phantoms of the sandy sharp wind against her cheeks that the man's form mostly protected hers from and brushes of the brown hair that had broken free from her bun; she blocked everything else and _concentrated solely on it._ Obeyed its wishes and _willed it_ to heal.

She needn't have bothered. A little push was all it needed.

She could feel that shadowed line where the stone had cracked in half sealing itself shut like a wound being sewn together, slowly closing. The stone in her hands _sang_ to her, children's voices in a language she could not hope to understand.

With time and effort, she knew, it might've found a way to do this by itself.

She closed her eyes and _listened,_ and didn't let up until it was whole again.

It seemed to like her, to _thank_ her, filtering through like a parent's touch—but true to her earlier thoughts it wanted to be returned.

There was a scar, however, as wounds do tend to leave, but it was so faint she knew she could will it away too. She'd had plenty of practice doing so, although all those scabs and scars were hers.

She determined she wouldn't be finished until she did.

It prompted her to, and so she looked up at the man, then, suddenly hesitant to show him the things this rare gift of hers her parents so constantly warned her about made her capable of. Yet had to pause in alarm at what she saw.

"You…!"

If the light around his form had blurred around the edges before, now the whole of it appeared to _flicker._ Colors condensed then slipped away like mist to disappear into the air around them both. Green and blue and blackened grey soot against violent violet and brilliant orange red, burning off, peeling away unimpeded like crackling ashes from a fire. Like water from a broken vase.

"What—" He coughed mid sentence, as if caught off guard anew by the heat, the dryness in the air. The coughing fit itself seemed to have startled him as much as her, just not enough to quench the worry her newfound stillness unwittingly ignited. "What is it?"

When he removed the gloved hand from his mouth, warm black fabric had been stained with something darker.

_(He was just **looking** at her, didn't he **see**?!)_

It was almost as if the stone—broken as it had been—had kept him together. A shield to a starship, a hull, or rather the atmosphere to a planet: a protective barrier, necessary to stop the life-force within from succumbing to the vacuum and escaping through the cracks.

And there were so many cracks she doubted he'd ever been whole.

She pressed the stone into his bare hand with both of hers. Hard. Without even showing it to him first and with a sudden urgency that scared even her. The terrible effect was gone in an instant, replaced for a second with the faint sound of droplets falling from the sky as the world around them turned a faded grey. The air tasted of standing water, and she struggled abruptly to remember the last time breathing during the day hadn't felt like fire. Silver droplets collided distinctively with her skin and from around her, her perception could barely catch the hint of light grey walls.

Behind him, iridescent, on the edges of her vision just out of reach, she could've sworn those walls were breathing.

Both her hands retreated as if the touch had burned her— _electrified her_ —and she was back in the dry and sand of Jakku's desert. Standing but hunched over, practically pressed into a ball, keeping her arms crossed and both hands gripping her forearms. Sweating under the merciless yellow light of the sun as if she'd never left.

The concerned confusion shining in his eyes told her perhaps she hadn't. She kept her own focused on the hand holding on to the stone to keep from seeing ghostly afterimages. It only mostly worked.

When she was conscious enough to process it she understood the man was blinking at her from a couple steps closer yet, his brows furrowed further in a worried frown.

"Are you—?"

He never got to finish, because when he was about to he became aware abruptly of the state of the light blue stone.

"I didn't do anything bad to it." She was quick to assure him, immediately on the defensive. It came naturally to her at this point. "I didn't _do_ anything to it."

It was only mostly true.

_(Since the last scavenger she'd healed a wound for had tried to sell her off to someplace off-planet, most things she said were only mostly true.)_

"You fixed it." He held it protectively in a fist that curled and uncurled against his chest like some indecisive flower. His eyes traveled from it to her, and back again. Much more guarded now, bewildered underneath superficial composure, as if seeing her for the very first time. His tone was one of incredulity. "You welded it. But—but _how?"_

She thought about fleeing again, but from such close distance he'd catch her before she could even think to move.

She shrugged, trying to seem as casual as he had. Avoiding panicked searching green eyes.

She refused to let her frustration overcome her; refused to give in to the fact that she didn't _know_ how to explain. Had never known. Hadn't ever _needed to,_ before.

Specially because—this time—she hadn't done much of anything at all.

"It wanted to fix itself." There was no other way to say this. She wasn't about to claim the credit. "It would've done so, eventually. But it wanted to speed off the process, and to do so it needed a channel of sorts, so I guess I just… let it."

Let it fix itself, _heal_ itself. Let it speed up the inevitable. Let it flow effortlessly through her like the air to her lungs or that feeling from before or the electric energy that souls are made of.

She hadn't been an active participant, not truly. The stone had done everything, she'd just _let it._

‘A channel of sorts’ was the closest equivalent she could think of for herself during the process.

She couldn't help but wonder, if she touched his hand again, if she'd be able to do that for him too. If whatever's wrong with him would _want_ to be fixed, or to follow on the original flow and completely fray apart instead.

"…It did everything by itself. It wouldn't even let me help."

_(She had the sinking feeling she knew which one it'd go for. She didn't want to risk it.)_

"It would've found another way to heal, it _wanted_ to, I just _let it."_

He put his right hand up in the air in a firm motion for her to stop.

_"It's fine."_

It had been a fight for him just being able to say that, she could tell, even though the failed attempt at comfort fell completely flat.

She looked up and then right back down, not nearly enough to grasp even the hint of an expression other than the fact he was grimacing.

She contemplated running once more.

She didn't do it.

When she looked up at the ginger man again, she found herself surprised that she could actually maintain the stare. His light had dimmed abruptly, practically to nonexistence, and he was shaking his head. His hair seemed to have sweat off the gel that had kept it neat and tidy, so it tussled like a flickering flame at the movement and short strands of it fell across his forehead like cut copper wire inside your average control panel stumbled across a couple years too late. His right hand had come up to press his nose hard between thumb and forefinger in a very human gesture that caught her off guard.

The attempt at a patient smile was still there—from when he'd tried in vain again to grin at her, misguidedly attempting to comfort her—but the flash of teeth was somehow sharper and the feeling behind it seemed much more forced now.

The hand flew from his face and made a mildly alarmed, incomprehensible gesture together with its next of kin. The effect somewhat diminished by one of them—the bare one—staying a fist: gripping the stone.

"You just let it." He huffed, a little bit hysterically, with tidbits of that earlier bewilderment filtering through. As if she'd said something funny, or perhaps as if she _most definitely_ hadn't. "Of course. My bad."

She wanted to flee, but—

"Are you alright?" She felt responsible, what with whatever she'd done, she couldn't just _leave_ him like this.

His hands repositioned themselves at his sides, as if he'd realized what they'd been doing and were holding them back from it. Then he nodded. The smile was gone.

"Alright."

 _"Alright?"_ She emphasized, strongly.

 _"Alright,"_ he reaffirmed. Tiredly she thought. His tone a ton more composed. Now it was him who seemed wary, just as much as he did weary. "Right as rain. I'm _fine._ It's just that—I was going to—guess now I can't offer…"

He trailed off, stood straighter. Closed his eyes for a bit then took a deep couple of breaths. When he pried them open again they seemed much more determined. He pocketed the stone back wherever he'd taken it, put on the missing glove, and extended his bag towards her.

"Well, I suppose now it doesn't matter. Do you—would you accept it, if I offered this to you?" Before she could think to shake her head no, blindsided, he continued. "There's food in it: ration bars. Insulated blankets and some water too." She wasn't sure he was even speaking to her, at this point; not _to_ her as much as _at_ her, rambling the outlines of a plan of action to himself. "If you practice moderation the perishable provisions should last for a while yet. Four Standard weeks at most, ten at a stretch. I could arrange for more to be delivered, once these run out, but I'm not sure that'd be the safest thing to do—"

She pushed the bag back towards him before he could keep going. "No."

He took that entirely the wrong way. His eyes narrowed a bit. "They haven't been tampered with, if that's what you're thinking. You can check if you'd like."

"No, that's _yours,"_ she said, with the emphasis of someone pointing the out the obvious. "I can't _take it_ from you."

"Why not?" His eyes widened right back as his tone raised incredulously. "I am clearly offering."

He didn't seem mad at her yet, just understandably surprised. She guessed he'd expected her to snatch it away from him before he had the chance to finish.

She'd expected that too. In any other circumstance, perhaps she would've—but something held her back, the same something from before. The distrust, the gut feeling, the _bad_ feeling.

"Because."

She _should've_ taken it, either way.

She didn't know _why_ she hadn't, other than the fact it seemed important, somehow, that she didn't.

 _"Because_ is _not a valid reason,_ young lady. Especially not to rejected food or water, least of all in a place like this." He scoffed reproachfully down at her. It reminded her a little of her dad, when she didn't want to eat something because it tasted bland or badly. What distant memories she still held on to at the very least. "Besides, I'm certain you'll believe me when I say the blankets are a much-appreciated commodity around these parts. _Especially_ at night."

The man himself in general reminded her the slightest bit of her dad, she thought. The way he stood, the way he frowned—even his hair, if it were darker, more russet terracotta brown than brilliant red. It was like staring at a distant relative, almost; or seeing her father's reflection in a broken mirror.

She shook it off as best she could as she shook her head no.

"Seriously? Child, my shuttle is close by and I need to be leaving soon anyway. These were just in case of any eventuality, because we all know how common _sandstorms_ are around these parts." He explained, patiently though visibly exasperated, firmly pushing the bag back towards her like a mechanic faced with a particularly stubborn bolt. _"I don't need them. Take them."_

Equally as firm, she restrained every ingrained instinct telling her to do as he said because he was right, and pushed it back.

_"No."_

"No, she says, when she so very clearly _wants_ to." He chuckled humorlessly, running a hand through his hair in frustration. Staring to the side as he exhaled his next words, the exhale turned into a heavy sigh halfway through when he ran that hand through his face too. "I'll never understand children." Sobering up, he stood up even straighter then offered the bag one last time. Letting it hang between them. "Look, you aren't _robbing_ this from me, or whatever nonsense it is your brain says. I am _giving it_ to you." The smile was back full force. Smaller, kinder. "Consider it payment, if you want to. You _did_ fix something for me."

"Helped it fix itself." She corrected, without missing a bit.

"Helped it fix itself," he was right behind her, his grin taking a turn just the wrong side of indulgent. "Whichever way it might be, that tidbit of rock is rather precious to me, and you made it _whole_ again." The bag wind up finding its way slightly further into her space. "You've _earned_ this much, _take it,_ or I swear I'll leave it here for someone else to find."

Hesitantly, she did.

She half expected him to snatch it away from her at the last second.

Maybe it was telling, the fact that he didn't.

She held it close to her chest, just in case.

"Expect more to be delivered to the residents of the villages close by in the coming months." He said, nodding distractedly and sharply once, apparently satisfied now he'd gotten his way. "I wasn't planning on tackling the project quite this early, and I couldn't before, but now I'm here… well, I suppose there's no harm in hurrying the inevitable. It _is_ my duty to change things for the better after all. Children like you, stuck living in these kinds of places, are just more of an incentive. Besides…" The gentle grin was back, for a fleeting moment, confidential as if he were sharing a secret. "I know someone who'd like to know the people of Jakku will have a reliable source of food and water for a change. I'll be starting another, more ambitious project soon, but I know he'll make sure everything here goes as it should be."

"Why?" This time, she _did_ mean to ask.

_Why are you doing this? Why are you telling me this? Why are you promising so many things that can't be done?_

And they couldn't be done, couldn't be _true,_ could they?

"Because _I can,_ now." He shrugged, as if it truly were that simple. "And if I can _I have to,_ don't I?"

"No, you don't." She pointed out, dubiously.

"Yes, I do. I _really_ do." He insisted. And it was almost funny, the intensity of it. At that moment, she couldn't think to describe him any other way than aggressively kind. "Although, if it'll make you feel better you can think nothing of it. Think I won't do it, or once I do think that I merely _wanted_ to. In fact it's better you forget you met me entirely. Either way I told you I'd do it, so now I'll have to find a way to. I made it a habit, trying not to lie to children, I try to stick by it unless strictly necessary—"

"I have a _name,_ you know."

"Pray tell, then, scavenger girl." He still seemed unfazed by her snappish demeanor. If anything, it made him smile again. "What's your name?

"Rey."

_"Rey…"_

He nodded distractedly at her, the syllables tilting as if he were committing her name to memory, archiving it in some folder in the data bank of his own mind.

She didn't know how that made her feel, but it was not a very comfortable feeling.

"Keep out of trouble then, Rey. Close to your parents, in the off-chance you have any. And if you see anyone in white armor?" He added the last part almost as an afterthought, mercifully ignoring or perhaps merely not noting the way the former made her flinch. His tone had gone grave. "Don't talk to them. Sneak off with some rations if you can, but _stars above_ don't let them see you. They're not here to harm you—" he was fast to reassure, as if on principle. "Just to deliver food and uphold peace, and generally help you until you finally decide to help yourselves, so quite the opposite in fact. But I'd rather not risk them taking an interest in you specifically. Even less taking you in."

"Taking me in?"

"To a starship in outer space, where you'd have an education, three meals a day and a place to sleep—"

He kept talking. Of conditions to meet. Of a price too high. Of values to uphold.

He kept talking. She'd just stopped listening.

Her heart stuttered.

There was a way out. There was a way. There—

_No._

She needed to _stay._ Her parents would come back for her. _They wouldn't just leave_ they wouldn't they wouldn't they couldn't have—

_(So **why** did she feel such a sudden certainty that they weren't coming back?)_

"Why not?" She asked, unable to stop herself. "Why not let them take me?! There's nothing _here_ for me. I need to—"

She'd been thinking, since she lost that ship she fixed—the only ship she ever got working—to two people she thought were her friends.

If there _was_ a way out, she could look for her parents. There _had_ to be a reason they hadn't come back yet. She could look for them. She could find them, if something bad happened to them—

"I need to _find_ _—_ _somebody."_

If something _happened_ to them—

"You wouldn't be safe there. Where I come from, that is." He avoided looking at her while he spoke. Cringing as if this were something tough for him to admit. "Not that many people are, honestly, but it'd be much more dangerous for _you._ Because of what you can do."

His right hand found the left, subconsciously clutching the sleeve. It was a protective motion, some defensive instinct that put a barrier between her and him.

She didn't let her eyes linger on the gesture, knowing once he noticed it he would snap back to that salute.

"Because of what I can do…?"

It baffled her. That _he_ would be scared of _her._ Yet, as her mother used to say, people often fear that which they do not understand.

"As I told you," he stood firm in his decision. "You wouldn't be _safe_ there"

"I'm not better off here, either."

She ground her teeth as she pointed that out. She did it out of remnant frustration, mostly; the real fight had gone out of her.

"It's not that I don't want you to go somewhere _better."_ He admitted readily, almost regretfully. "I planned on taking you in myself, if you'd come willingly."

 _I wouldn't have,_ she didn't say, but thinking it steeled her resolve.

"It's just—there's someone, where I come from." He was being vague again, and rather seemed like he'd want nothing less than specify. "A very, _very_ bad person. A monster. And from what I've gathered, he's looking for people like you." He stared her in the eye, his words carefully enunciated. "If anything, you'll be safer here, trust me. I'll try to make living conditions better—or well, at the very least _liveable._ Jakku is not a friendly place."

"Places _can't_ —be friendly."

He was grinning again. "No, not that I know of; but some sure can be hostile, can't they?"

She couldn't argue with him on that front.

He attempted to keep talking after a few seconds, unbothered still by the way that she snapped. But she interrupted him before he could start.

"Will you come back?"

She'd meant to ask something else. _Anything_ else. She'd meant to _say_ something else. She didn't know what came over her.

There was so much else _to_ ask.

"I don't think so." It was an unusually soft answer, and after giving it he sighed again. Taking in air deeply and then letting it out as if he were making a concession to himself instead of her. Eyes turning from a cloudy sky to a steel wall in the expanse of single breath. "I already have all I came here to find. But I shall try to make time."

She didn't want to see his face, suddenly, and it had nothing to do with unusual fluctuations of light.

She had learned to dislike pity. And sympathy only slightly less.

"Don't." She _did_ know why she said that.

And how could she not, wasn't it obvious?

The planet itself was all but _bleeding_ with it.

_"Don't."_ She repeated, firmer this time. "It doesn't want you to."

He raised an eyebrow at her.

"The stone?"

_"Jakku."_

The clarity of his eyes had diminished, adopting a questioning glint, but it cleared all over again at that.

"Oh," he exclaimed, staring inquisitively to the side and into the distance as if this were a perfectly reasonable explanation. _"Oh,_ so _that's_ what it was."

In a way, it was. But not many people _saw._

He didn't, either. The stone could only show so much.

So much, it'd told her, and to so very little.

This man was one in a thousand in a billion. The stone wanted to stay with him because of that. But it wanted to go _home_ too.

It just no longer knows where that is.

She's just the same, in a way. Many people are.

For some, people whispered, the war had never ended. She had to wonder if this man was one of those.

After a few seconds' deliberation, he pointed towards the bag. "There's a communicator there too. Old tech, from the time of the Clone Wars; equipped with a decent holoprojector. Its private frequency is only connected to another one that I have, so not a one-way signal but nearly as limited. Practically untraceable, since it renders audio as encrypted holograms in aurebesh instead, although I'm sorry to say it's useless in any other capacity. Forget about selling it for scraps, without the other one they won't give you anything of value. For now it only supports Basic, I was thinking of using it for—" He cut himself off, the artificially cheery tone faltering. "Something else, but since I don't think I'll be able to come back without jeopardizing either your security or my mission, it'll do as a kind of insurance. Whenever you want to talk—or, more importantly, if _anything_ is wrong—just sent me a message, I'll find a way to fix it."

"Why?" _How?_ Is what she wanted to ask, but didn't.

Who _was_ this man, really?

_"Why,_ she asks again. Is everyone here so wary of genuine goodwill, I wonder? You people make yourselves very hard to help. It's becoming a nuisance, frankly." He rolled his eyes, though she had the feeling not at her, but at the planet itself. "I've said it before and I'll say it again: think of it as a kind of insurance. I need to make sure no one is slacking off on the job, after all, nor anything worse than that. And although I _do_ want to trust on the people under my command, having an agent among the locals tends to pay off on that front."

The congenital, agreeable confidential tone had come back with a vengeance. She's certain, if he were anyone else, he'd have winked at her.

As it was, he straightened, sobering up quickly. "If you _do_ end up using it, send a message at least preferably once a week. Pick a day, if you can. I can't promise I'll answer immediately, but I _can_ promise—as long as I'm alive—that eventually I will. Adhering to an schedule might make it easier. Don't worry also about a message history either; this thing doesn't have the capacity to leave any. Read every message carefully though, because, whether you send or receive it, you only get to read it once."

"How will you know it's me writing the messages? If it runs out of batteries," she began, and why was she even _considering_ this? "What then, should I trade something else for a new power cell or—"

"What? No!" He waved off her concerns somewhat impatiently, like someone swatting a bothersome insect. "It still has the original power cell. Like I said: this stuff is _ancient._ Anything else would fry it. That thing won't fly you a land-bound ship for a kilometre, nevermind to space, but leave it where it is and its functionality will outlive us both. Trust me, by the time it stops working, there won't be anyone human alive today left around to worry about it. As for the identification issue…" He appeared thoughtful, then snapped his fingers as if illuminated by some bright idea. "Well, as someone with some experience on the subject, I don't think much can be done for it other than identifying yourself right at the start of a message. Or signing it off in some way. Mentioning topics we've breached before from the get-go in a manner that doesn't give anything away might be convenient too. Sneaking in a trick question mostly works as a preventative measure also. I shall strive to do the same if you do, and of course I'll give you a crash course on how to actually use the thing before I leave."

She stared up at him.

Either she was going insane or the man's own brand of insanity was contagious, but this had started to seem _plausible. Reasonable,_ even.

The man was still talking, unwittingly plowing over whatever objections she may have had. Not that she could presently think of any beyond the obvious.

"Your well-being is of upmost importance here, so we must agree on a distress signal of sorts that I can use to warn you about danger. That _you_ can use in case—" he seemed to be fighting against his own words, again, but in a far different way from before. As if it were physically daunting to even think on the subject. _"That someone_ finds you. The evil man I spoke of. The one who's looking. I'd rather we settle on it when we're talking on the subject through the secure line though. You can question me properly then too. I can't promise I'll answer, but it _is_ your right to ask. In the meantime, what shall I call you?"

"What?" She blinked. The man's light had dimmed an alarming amount again while he talked. "What do you mean?"

He blinked back at her, as if it was obvious. Smiling indulgently once again. "Well I can't just call you _by your name,_ now can I? That's not how spy work works, young lady— _Rey."_

What should _he_ call her…?

How could _she_ tell him, when she herself had never really known?

Although, perhaps that was no longer true.

She'd been told—by the old yellow twi'lek woman with four headtails who'd let her stay in a room like any other traveler even though she hadn't the money to pay for it, on the eighth day of the Standard week she spend pursuing this man—that she reminded her of a couple travelers from off-world who had been there a long time ago. Junk scrappers, by their own admission.

Most travelers were forgettable, the old twi'lek had said, but it was the ones who didn't want to be found—the ones who paid handsomely, slightly more than their given fee, who gave tips and were overly secretive and rarely overly kind like these two had been—who, ironically enough, left behind them the most memorable trail.

Rey guessed that metaphor worked well for the man in front of her, too.

The twi'lek told her they had a daughter. Told her she didn't forget a memorable face and so hadn't forgotten their faces, all three of them, and that Rey was that daughter personified.

Once eagerly questioned the old twi'lek said they hadn't given her any first names—and she didn't ask—but when she insisted on a last name the husband had seemed to flail for an answer before the wife of the couple held his forearm firmly—reassuringly—and gave hers for the both of them. Her husband had taken it when they'd gotten married, the woman said, and not the other way around. The sweet secret smile they shared together when they'd both thought she wasn't looking told the old innkeeper it wasn't a lie.

"Solana." Rey said, then and there, to the man isolated at the edge of that cliff.

She might've never known this—never remembered it—were it not for the redheaded man that something within her and outside her and _around her_ compelled her to follow. Might've never ventured far enough from her usual scavenging sites, been hungry enough and desperate enough, for circumstances to present themselves so that it was revealed to her anew.

It didn't feel like _her own name,_ not really, though she had been rather certain before that her last name started with an ‘S’. It was always just at the tip of her tongue.

"Call me Solana. I'm Rey Solana."

It had stunned her, when she first heard it. Like a distant memory she knew she shouldn't have been able to recall.

_It didn't feel like her name,_ not as much as it could. Not as much as it should. But it most assuredly sounded familiar, and if she tried it might yet become hers again.

"Well then, Rey Solana." The pale redheaded man nodded approvingly as he _smiled_ one final time at her, inner light flaring brighter, something vicious but—somehow—still kind. Extending a firm gloved hand towards her. "It is nice to meet you, I am the Operator. The successor to the mantle in any case. Here's hoping I can finish the job and may the stars speed our success."

She shook his hand hesitantly, relieved when the glove he'd put back on at some point cancelled whatever bizarre effect the one from before had been, feeling abruptly like her life had just veered sideways straight towards a change of course.

She'd yet to know if it would be for the better. But she could hope.

"Now," he continued after a few seconds. "Don't think I didn't notice just how long you've been trailing after me. You must be far away from home indeed." _Someone must be worried sick,_ she could almost hear him remark, but at the last second decide not to assume; she took it for the nonverbal apology that it was. "Do allow me to escort you back there if you don't mind. I walked all the way here from the Plaintative Hand plateau though, and I don't feel like retreating the same way when I'm dead on my feet. I'll rent us a vehicle at the outpost—"

He turned his head around halfway, when he noticed she wasn't following behind.

"What are you waiting for, Solana girl?"

There was something curious, she thought, about the way he seemed to struggle to properly pronounce her name—the ghost of a different syllable slipping through.

She gave one last look to the bent, distant shape made off of stone—the one he'd been staring at. Farther away from here than it was from the AT-AT that she had gradually turned into home.

"It's cold." She whispered, assaulted abruptly by a feeling of grief and hopelessness not her own.

The breach in the stone had been nothing compared to this. This felt like fear. Anger, aggression. _Death._

It passed before she could think to pinpoint the source.

She looked up at the sky, then, and saw the frightening phantom of lightning.

Then she turned around abruptly and hurried once again to follow after the ginger man clad in black. "I'm coming!"

She needn't have bothered. He hadn't advanced much without her.

"If I may intrude," he casually started with thinly veiled interest once she caught up, in a low voice as if the sand itself might be listening in, "who was this person or people you said you were trying to find?"

* * *

**… … …** Luke Skywalker's Temple Of The New Jedi, 00:11 AM Standard Time. 28 ABY, Two Standard Weeks Before Ben Solo's Fall To The Dark Side / The Day Armitage Hux's Personal Transport Arrived Alone At Jakku Near The Observatory **… … …**

* * *

The temple was burning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You're thinking it, I'm thinking it, I'm just gonna say it: _Stone, heal thyself!_
> 
> (And Hux what did we say about _the tone issues geez…!)_
> 
> Also congrats on getting here everyone, because we've just officially broke right into what I call the Kylo Ren narration arc!
> 
> Now that that's out of my system. Ah.
> 
> It's Rey! WOOH! THE CHASE IS ON PALPATINE!
> 
> …Sooo, now you know who warned that village back in chapter 2.
> 
> Sorry, I know we had Finn, the girls and the rest of the whole of the Stormtrooper program already—but you are adopting another space child *points towards the Fix-it Of Sorts tag* if I'm going to honor that I'm giving Rey somewhat a better childhood. She deserves it damn it.
> 
> Encountering her was a must really. In the original drafting Hux just left her the bag then warned her about Stormtroopers whilst promising there'll be more coming—he neglects to mention the presence of the blankets so it's not until she sees them later that she believes him (a story element out of many I sadly had to cut). This so Rey could be somewhat the true outside perspective when it came to him later on.
> 
> But I made the mistake of momentarily forgetting he had a pair of encrypted communicators on him at the time, and so when I wrote this _he_ remembered that convenient tidbit that he was rescuing from the Observatory ruins and I had a whole other plot-point ringing on, and was like: "Nope, definitely NOT leaving a Force-sensitive kid to fend for herself alone in a highly-hostile desert planet with a tyrannical madman out there, I am slipping one of these into the bag and that's final sorry not sorry if that messes up the plot" because he's practical like that. So I was down an elaborate sub-plot but he was up another charge, and Rey was up a better childhood by comparison. Truthfully I'm not really that regretful about letting him get away with this, ultimately the characters drive the story.
> 
> In other news: you _cannot_ out-stubborn Armitage Hux, Rey. It is impossible. Give up and take the thing, already.
> 
> She's right though, only Hux would find a way to be _aggressively kind._ Then again, we all know once the man decides to dedicate himself to something he _dedicates himself to it._ Full-time, full-stop. Utterly and completely. (Good thing this time it's arguably the right thing, huh? Because that is a subjective but PRETTY DANGEROUS character flaw.)
> 
> (…What did you think made Brendol go from verbal backlash with mild physical punishment to outright torture? I mean there's precedent for sudden escalation of that kind with this guy sure, but did you stop to think for a bit that perhaps Hux may _have_ actually done something to warrant so strong a response?)
> 
> (Something reckless and impulsive that there wasn't really a way to come back unscathed from and overall an idea that in his right mind he probably would've scoffed at. There's precedent for that too *points tellingly towards the whole of Arkanis, that Sol already-hates-damp-planets Rivas did most definitely not do justice* though I'm not elaborating any more on the matter yet *ominously whistles the Ballad of Cora Vesora*)
> 
> Sorry to cut off where I did, by the way. Originally I had a whole segment planned for Ben, and then I started writing the first sentence, and when I finished it just felt like a sin to write anything else.
> 
> Sometimes there's stuff that speaks for itself. Images do tend to speak louder than words too, so: [**Here**](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/857d742c-0ab3-4da4-af44-0f8d80615dd0/debvryu-a776fdab-ab30-4f28-a766-81fd6a1a3a40.png/v1/fill/w_990,h_807,q_70,strp/the_temple_was_burning_by_angelinaira_debvryu-pre.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOiIsImlzcyI6InVybjphcHA6Iiwib2JqIjpbW3siaGVpZ2h0IjoiPD04MjIiLCJwYXRoIjoiXC9mXC84NTdkNzQyYy0wYWIzLTRkYTQtYWY0NC0wZjhkODA2MTVkZDBcL2RlYnZyeXUtYTc3NmZkYWItYWIzMC00ZjI4LWE3NjYtODFmZDZhMWEzYTQwLnBuZyIsIndpZHRoIjoiPD0xMDA4In1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmltYWdlLm9wZXJhdGlvbnMiXX0.icPQj2YVC8Y6pW1ul4VCkwjAOGqjjb6gDwhNSZOYrKA), have an optional compensatory image. Don't get used to those. Or, do, I might make more and retroactively add them at some point. Credits to Marvel, Disney, Lucasfilm and TROKR artists for the original (please don't sue me) I just combined two relevant panels and fixed a sloppily drawn hand after I went crazy with the color scheme. Is it apocalyptic enough yet? I should think so.
> 
> It better. I had this chapter ready for posting by the 7th—except the image _wasn't ready, actually._ Wasted the entirety of two days trying to find out why then trying to find myself a proper hosting site that wouldn't degrade quality. Finally did though, hopefully won't have to repeat the experience.
> 
> That said, read you next week! (And there be Kylo! *throws confetti*)


	7. Cold snow (little slipped through the cracks in the wall)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Present Date And Location:**
> 
> * * *
> 
> **… … …** Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer Finalizer, 01:00 PM Standard Time. 34 ABY, Official Firing Date **… … …**
> 
> * * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hm. *considers adding the ‘That's Not How The Force Works’ tag* Hmm. *remembers no one even in universe knows how the Force works anymore* Eh, nevermind. *adds it anyway* As always take care out there, hope you're alright and _mind the tags._ I have mostly updated them.
> 
> So, another word count risk (it kinda worked out but I swear I did not intend for the word count to end up this _rounded),_ who cares though because this is the end of the buffer and at last we got here! Well what are you waiting for? Read on. Just a short necessary plot detour then there be KYLO! FINALLY!
> 
> Seriously, most of his segments have been written down for _ages_ and they've undergone more revision than anyone else's I think. He was supposed to be the second chapter's main narrator before I realized only using both him and Hux as narrators would spoil important plot points literally from the get-go but I couldn't use only Finn as outsider either. I'm as relieved as you that we finally got to him.
> 
> Read on, read on for weird Force shenanigans and surprise guest stars with a spicing of Kylo Ren angst! It's going to be a wild ride. Just remember to have fun!

* * *

**… … …** Somewhere In Orbit Over Arkanis - Executor-Class Star Dreadnought Eclipse, 07:36 AM Standard Time. 19 ABY, Fifty Minutes Before The Raid **… … …**

* * *

"It's madness!"

"That's what I said."

"Tell him it can't be done—"

"Wasn't my choice to make, apparently."

He stood up. A metallic chair crashed with the metallic floor.

"You want me to sit still while you burn my planet to the ground? Is that it?! Not only that, you want me to tell you _how!?_ Because you're _crazy_ if you think that I'll—!"

His father wasn't looking at him.

It came as no surprise, it was a fact of life, his father was _never_ looking at him.

But Brendol was staring disapprovingly _at his hands._ And he hadn't noticed he'd started gesticulating with them—flinging them around in a wild manner because he couldn't help himself as if it would serve to do anything but diminish the point—until he'd noticed that much.

He stood frozen, breathing heavily. Closed his eyes, took a moment to center himself and further stilled his hands. Moved them to his sides— _forced_ them to his sides, when they wouldn't move, wouldn't stop shaking. He willed them to stop but they turned into fists instead so he relaxed them but they wouldn't do _that_ either. So he was stuck on a loop in an endless grabbing motion, palms clenching and unclenching, finger curling and uncurling like the springs of a defective mechanism.

"There are easier ways. To deal. With terrorists."

_Breathe,_ he told himself. For the first time in years, his thoughts confused with someone else's voice; someone he hadn't talked to in a lifetime. _Breathe Armitage._

"Not according to the little king at his little hill, there aren't."

_Inhale._ His mother's patient mantra went, steadying, barely a faint memory, but Armitage Hux never forgets anything.

"If this is a lesson for you to learn then let the tyrant teach it to you _personally, Father._ And not involve the billions of people who are down there."

_Exhale,_ it came again, and when it did he opened his eyes not to let the memory linger. Else he got lost in the grey.

"You are mistaken. This was a request. Someone was going to tear this world apart: I'd rather it be me."

He'll have plenty of time to do that when he's down there.

"Find someone else to communicate those orders." Blue eyes like ice bore into his own, staring daggers. He wasn't a child anymore; he didn't let the glare stop him from turning away whilst telling himself he wasn't running from it. "If you think I'm carrying them out _Commandant,_ we warned, you are in—for a nasty shock."

Behind him, the steady rhythm his father's fingers had been tapping on the durasteel table turned to a single _bang._

"If you don't plan on doing as you're told, _boy;_ then let someone else do it as you have so kindly suggested."

"No."

"What did you just say to me."

The word on his tongue tasted like lead paint; he swallowed around it. "I said no." He turned again, answered the cruel glare there to meet him with one of his own. "Grand Admiral Sloane herself assigned me to this mission, _with all due respect sir,_ neither you nor the monster who commands you have the authority to remove me from it."

"This will not be the end of it."

"No, it won't."

With that and an _incredulousstrangledcutshort laugh_ that was poison, he turned away from the man clad in black, and after a flash of teal the mechanical double doors snapped shut.

_("Hugs… C'mon Red… Hey Hugs, you still with us?" Many hours later, after he's sent everyone else away for their own damn safety and as a result been tackled out of the way of an imminent cave in by a suspicious prisoner with a penchant for getting on his nerves turned strangely flirtatious reluctant ally of all people, when he's lying on the soft ground the grey ash-like sand **everywhere** as he's being gently but insistently slapped on the cheek by the aforementioned man whose concerned face is far too close for comfort and there's a petite girl in the edge to his field of vision asking the others if they're alright… this will be the first memory to compute in his concussion addled brain.)_

_(He'll even out his breathing then too, force himself to ignore a lingering scent of spice and focus on how the faint light blue shielding around the whole of his body—useless at stopping **anything but air** and emanating from the simplecompacttransparent mask that appropriately restricted his capacity for drawing in said air even more—was starting to flicker and lose presence because he hadn't actually changed the chip since they'd entered, just muted the warnings so no one would ask, so they'd **assume**. And how that wasn't good. Or so some tiny part of him still invested in his own survival kept reminding him. "Get off me, you ridiculous, insufferable flyboy.")_

_(His left hand scrambled for a teal coat pocket, took a light blue chip out of the nearest and unceremoniously exchanged the one blackened beyond recognition beneath his ear at the side of the otherwise see-through mask for that one, threw the discarded chip away in the same motion. The shielding faltered for a single heartbeat—long enough to give him heartburn—before it steadily stabilized. He'd get pat on the shoulder mid reboot; a little harder than strictly necessary for a friendly gesture. "There you go, see? He's insulting me, he's fine! Thank stars, you gave the kids a heart attack.")_

_(…Parnassos' partial destruction had been expected, later on, because his father had a habit of wanting to destroy the places he felt had wronged him in any way in a fairly explosive manner—and someday **something** about remembering that fact would make him want to laugh.)_

* * *

**… … …** Expansion Region Ombakond Sector - Belovia, 10:15 AM Standard Time. 28 ABY, Nearing The Start Of The Search / About A Year Before The Day Kylo Ren Officially Met Armitage Hux **… … …**

* * *

"Have you ever heard the phrase ‘living on borrowed time’?"

They'd been walking for hours at this point and the blizzard had yet to assuage its assault. The Captain was walking a couple meters forward, chrome armour shining a silver lining against their blinding white surroundings. The icy path in front of them, buried underneath fresh snow, was barely visible only due to its bluish glittery appearance.

Rey hoped this planet wouldn't turn out to be yet another dead end, but if it did, they could be done with it early; and then, since they were close, they could finally check out the planet that she'd felt the strongest pull towards when she thought about her parents. The one she'd pointed at when showed the Observatory's starmap: Pasaana.

It'd been her idea to try that method in the first place, since she had no other leads when it came to her parents but it had been hard to convince them to let her tag along on their journey until they had to return home—too hard for her to simply give up.

She feared they might just be indulging her, at first, but then she'd started talking to the Operator about what she saw. And how it was so different from how _he_ saw. And realized they might just need her after all.

He saw the galaxy and its people as they were, called the way she saw it strange visual hallucinations. She counteracted him by saying they gave her far too much insight to be just her imagination. That perhaps _she_ saw the universe as it was, and he saw just a little less.

He'd stayed silent afterward. Asked her if she could pinpoint a location for the man— _monster_ —they were all looking for. She said no, since she'd never met that man. Told him perhaps, if she did, she could.

The redhead had stared at her as if she'd said something suicidal. _No,_ he'd said firmly, _You won't ever meet him if we can prevent it._

And that was that.

He was still silent, as if he hadn't heard her; so she nudged his arm slightly, arranged a flowing strand of brown hair that had broken free from her braids right back behind her ear and repeated herself.

"Have you ever heard the phrase ‘living on borrowed time’?"

Eyes closed, he sighed, his breath spread like mist as they left it behind. Then grinned that smile that wasn't a smile, as if he were laughing at some private joke that in hindsight he found mildly insulting.

"I have. Who hasn't. Pray tell, Solana girl, why do you ask me such a morbid question?"

"No reason. It's just…"

She thought about the way he'd shone in the light, like the snow surrounding them now. The way that, when he'd given her the blue stone, his very being had seemed to fade away and shatter.

"It's just…?"

"Don't take this the wrong way." She took a step closer to him. "But when I look at you, that's the impression I get. Like you're—living on borrowed time."

When she held onto his coal-coloured greatcoat for guidance, he didn't stop her. His grin had turned to a real smile. It was a subtle but rather telling difference.

"Well, if I am, let's make it count shall we? We're making Phasma wait, walk faster kid."

* * *

**… … …** What Was Once Ilum - Starkiller Base Planning Site, 10:15 PM Standard Time. 29 ABY, About A Year After Ben Solo's Fall To The Dark Side / A Week After The Day Kylo Ren Officially Met Armitage Hux **… … …**

* * *

After practically half a year drifting aboard from starship to starship and almost a year spent mostly in open space, Kylo was pale. His tan lines had faded and his freckles even seemed more faint.

It happened so gradually he himself never even noticed until one day he woke up, splashed his face, took a towel and whilst drying his hair stared himself down in the fresher's misty mirror and realized his skin was white as bone.

It was upsetting because he'd _always_ been tan—as Ben. His father might've been a pilot but Ben had always been more grounded. He _liked_ planets, as a general rule, just as long as they weren't cold. And he'd always had a sun to rely on no matter the planet.

He didn't, now. Hadn't since the temple exploded in front of him, a burst of electricity and fire.

His eyes were a duller brown than they'd been back then, too; a way-worn wooden mahogany, instead of the rich yellowish clay that another student of the New Jedi had compared them to once. Faded like his freckles, like his tan.

He'd touched his hand to the mirror's smooth surface. Wondered when something changed, or if it had been changing all along.

Ben had always been tan. Tan and colorful and something else which he refused to call _happy,_ because happiness wasn't something that a Dark sided user should feel. Not by itself. Not if it wasn't grounded in the Dark. Not if it wasn't a passionate, twisted sort of enjoyment for the art of taking a life.

Of _taking,_ generally speaking. Taking anything from anyone anywhere because he needed it or wanted it, whether they'd willingly give it or not.

Kylo was _pale as a corpse,_ and something foreign buried within continuously told him that fact was something he should be proud of, but it just—

He hated it, almost as much as he'd grown to hate the coldness of space that had stolen the color from his frame.

_(Most of all, he'd hated **what it implied**.)_

…He'd broken that mirror. Didn't even have to lift a finger. It'd just shattered into a million pieces that went flying everywhere. The rest of what he'd done that day had gotten him kicked from the last ship he'd been in.

He didn't know what there was about the General as he appeared now—leaning against the shiny metallic handrail with his back to Kylo, facing a distant darkened sky alight with snowfall and starlight—that made him remember the experience. Perhaps because General Hux's skin was pale too, equally if not more so, not a blemish on sight.

Kylo, at least, still had the faded traces of that old sunkissed tan; of sun spots and freckles— _of something that had been there, could be there, again_ —but Hux didn't.

Hux's skin was pale as _starlight,_ and the thought hit him then because it was a very apt comparison. Side by side, his figure set over monochrome metal and colorless crystals and fleeting stars, gray on white on black overlaid by a thousand shades of color as nebulae appeared from a distance… honestly it was hard to distinguish the difference.

Hux looked the part of a white star, cast off of something bigger when it burned away. Or a comet; almost prismatic. Cold and fleeting and so very—

_(Familiar…? Beautiful—? **Lonely**?)_

It was strange, to be dwelling on this now. It was significant maybe, that that had been the first road his mind had taken, but he didn't know _why._ And that infuriated him.

He tried to embrace that fury, that _anger,_ make it part of him. He tried but he was _still_ just staring at Hux and it just—fizzled out. Fading off into the empty air, into the Living Force.

Seeing Hux like this, so distant and silent and _quiet_ for once, just after a meeting when he'd been the same defiantly composed and confident flashing flame, ever moving in the face of his peers, that his hair seemed to convey now as ever-constant air ventilation blew it this way or that one—and Hux's hair had _always_ been perfectly combed back _what was up with that_ —was almost too much like seeing a candle flicker on and off.

For a moment he feared, irrationally, that Hux would be suddenly snuffed out. Vanished, too. Burned away, come apart, like that bigger star he'd surely resulted of. Burned out and disappeared without a trace in the expanse of a heartbeat, at the first strong gust of icy wind.

Then the optical illusion faded fast, he came back to reality blinking as if out from a trance, and asked himself _why_ on Coruscant he'd _feared_ that of all things. Why he held anything but contempt for that thought.

He'd barely met the man, nevermind interacted with him. Had been here with the snow and the kyber and the snotty High Command officers as only company for all of two months at the least before the busy, overworked General apparently— _finally_ —had the time to spare to deign give him the time of day himself, instead of having to hear everything from warped mental outside perspectives and other such third party sources. And that first meeting hadn't even been _intentional_ by either of them.

Part of him couldn't help but think that, outside of a few choice necessary debriefings Kylo had dragged himself to out of a duty to his new Master since, Hux sought to avoid him. Perhaps unconsciously. And with what purpose, he hadn't the faintest idea.

Maybe it was that instantaneous distrust and dislike the man had taken towards him when they first met.

He'd never forget it, he was certain, because when he'd entered the official holochamber to see a shock of ginger hair belonging to a man clad in grayish black—a man standing straight-backed and stiff-shouldered with a face like a mask of his own—the first time in his life _( ~~out of many to come~~ )_ that he'd come in just to see there was someone else already facing Snoke's ever intimidating figure…

He'd felt a surge of déjà vu so strong if the Force hadn't led him true he's sure his steps might have faltered.

And it had been mutual too, of that much he was certain even if neither of them acknowledged it; because the man had looked at him as if he _knew_ him, as if he'd cut and seen straight through the black eerie mask to the breakable young man beneath. Met his eyes and Kylo _felt it,_ then: a dissonance, a dissonant tune resonating in the Force around him.

It sounded like _hate._ Powerful and primal and _instinctive_ hate. Resentment like something _alive,_ and a distrust that ran deep with perhaps a driven touch of fear underneath. A touch of something else too. A touch of many things.

He felt it and without even meaning to he chased it to the source and he found—

Nothing.

It'd banished without a trace, as if it had never even been there. As if he'd all but imagined it. Leaving behind as ordinary a military man as someone within the Supreme Leader's graces could be expected be, a ginger brow raised, evaluating him expertly as if he were again a mere student in the midst of an important test.

The man's very being was like a _wall._ A mine's wall, monochrome gray and full of unbalanced kyber crystals like dynamite, but a wall nonetheless. A fractured one, yes, but the fractures were so faint he wouldn't have seen them if he hadn't been instinctively looking for them. If he didn't—somehow, subconsciously—already know where they'd be.

It left him baffled, though he'd cared enough to shield himself and not let it shine through.

…Kylo Ren's first impression of General Hux _should've been_ that the redheaded General he was supposed to share Co-Commandership of a ship with after both their stay in this skeleton of the Base had come to an end was equal amounts exceedingly idealistic, brilliant and insane. If incredibly resentful and not particularly cultured.

That last assertion would turn out to be far wrong, however, since Hux was one of few people left in the universe able to identify an old and battered—though unbelievably well cared for— _Alderaanian uniform_ by _sight alone_ when the technically prince of Alderaan _(who had been **right there** and who could personally tell you more about the ancient culture of the long dead Jedi than many old historians yet)_ couldn't have done it then if his life had depended on it, and that had to count for something.

He wouldn't have had the benefit of hindsight then however, and the fact that one of five guesses was erred wouldn't have negated the other four shots in the dark. In fact had that been Kylo's first impression of Hux here too, when compared to latter revisions born of bitter rivalry and cultivated spite, it might've even been the closest to the real deal he'd ever get.

But that _wasn't_ it. Not here, at least.

This time, when he first met Hux? His first impression was: _This is a man who is good at pretending._

Because at a glance Hux seemed calm and collected, but something felt fundamentally _wrong_ even then. Something that told Ben it was all just a front.

Truth be told it wasn't that hard a fact to figure out, once he'd taken that second look which rang more of a double take. _Anyone_ that obsessed with being in control of absolutely everything precisely one hundred percent of the time, as a general rule, had to have quantifiably more anxiety than gel in his hair.

One would've thought that someone so concerned with seeming logical and unruffled would understand that as long as other people were involved he couldn't possibly plan everything out and have it go _right._ Not always. Not ever. And Hux had seemed like the kind of person a notion like that would break, once accepted, once internalized.

…And then there was the after. When Snoke had disconnected. When they both stood with almost practiced synchronicity on an empty hallway just outside the locked doors to the holochamber, supposed to be on their separate ways. When the barrier of a distant threat was barely there, and he went on to leave—

_Wait, Ren_.

Hux had stopped him.

Simply called out to him without even the hint of respect deserving his proper title just after they'd met. Called him by _that_ name, the one he'd taken from the man he'd taken his Knights from something short of a year ago now.

If it were anyone else he might've just lost control and snapped their neck, independent of their perceived importance to his new Master, but it being _Hux—_

It mattered. Even then.

He might've done it, but he didn't.

He _didn't know why,_ but he didn't.

_(Later on, he'd blame it on the fact that the man's composure just had that much of a calming effect. Everyone knew that the best way to avoid an unwilling confrontation was by making your opponent feel irrational for lashing out first. It was a sound, true and tried tactic, and Hux acted like a hardened veteran at it.)_

He didn't lash out. Just turned to face the man swiftly, silently, his robes billowing slightly with some nonexistent air current. Left the mask facing the man and kept his eyes somewhere to the shiny durasteel wall behind because for some reason it was easier to glance at the physical alternative than squint at Hux's abstraction of one. Squared his shoulders, made his best to seem intimidating and strong and not like the helpless aspiring Jedi child glancing up at Snoke still made him feel like, some days. Made his best to seem like he was _daring_ the man to continue talking.

Just because they were supposed to work together from now on, for however long this one man out of many tolerated his presence, that didn't mean he had to like it.

General Hux's eyes—sharp as shattered glass—carefully studied him a second time.

Considering. Evaluating. Calculating.

As if doing so for the very first one. As if _truly_ absorbing him, truly allowing themselves to fully take him in.

Hux's green glare met his eyes again, like it'd done before and would perhaps on accident continue to do. The force of his stare, still as unnerving as it was the first time, _met his eyes_ through the mask as if the General knew exactly where they were or could reliably guess. As if Kylo might as well have not been wearing it at all.

And then he asked:

_Do I know you?_

It'd been such a simple question. Such a short statement but it'd stopped whatever angry thought process Kylo had been entertaining at the time right in its tracks.

It was _such a simple question._ Do I know you? Have I met you, before?

The answer should be obvious. He _knew_ what it was. He still knows.

But it was impossible because the first answer that came to mind, the _right_ answer, the first the Force gave him, the one that felt like the truth—

Was impossible. Because. No.

No, he didn't know Hux. No, Hux didn't, _couldn't have,_ known him.

_(So **why** was every cell that made him up midichlorians included shouting at him to answer the opposite?)_

He didn't answer; restrained the unexpected compulsion to, more out of having been blindsided so thoroughly by it than any actual intent to do so. Hux took that for answer enough.

_My apologies, I—_

He'd seemed phased, in the odd professional way that he barely seemed to be feeling anything at all.

 _I do not know what came over me. We just met_.

He knew what the question was meant to convey, perhaps better than Hux himself appeared to, and it wasn't what Hux was implying. But still he busied himself counting the lines in the durasteel plating and hid behind his silence for as long as he dared.

Then, with one last considering look, the man had swiftly turned around after a somewhat hesitant nod of acknowledgement—as if not trusting himself with his back to Kylo—and marched away. Undeterred in his propriety. In a steady pace Kylo couldn't help but envy for its perfect military pitch.

He himself had never quite managed it.

_(In due time he'd yet learn to keep up with Hux step by step, but he wouldn't have known that then, and by then he certainly wouldn't have thought himself capable of mustering the patience for cultivating the skill.)_

_(Despite what were apparently the rest of the universe's thoughts on the matter, he hadn't been **born** to fight a war.)_

_(Hadn't even wanted to be a part of it. Originally.)_

…He'd envied too the way the greatcoat seemed to flow more naturally behind Hux, like a cape or rather a cloak of sorts, when his own robes still felt like anything but a second skin. Like an invading unnatural thing. A serpent coiled around him, the few times he fell asleep in them and forgot and awoke in a cold sweat with the memory of lightning, restrictive sheets and a radioactive green light.

There was a reason he mostly slept uncovered, despite how much he despised and hated and resented the _cold._

He hated this place for the exact same reason. What it had been. What it could become. Though he knew perhaps he shouldn't.

This had been Ilum, this had been an Imperial mine.

It had been recovered, it had been retaken, it had been a place his grandfather might've visited once or maybe twice in a lifetime.

It had been the place where Uncle Luke had taken an impatient Ben to make his very first lightsaber; the one he'd destroyed, the one that was gone.

It had been sacred and it had been worthless and it had changed more hands than Kylo had twice over—and now it had been _defiled and emptied,_ its core extinguished to make a weapon.

He—

Didn't know how to feel, about that, but he knew he should be feeling _something._ Something negative. Anything.

Emptiness was _not_ of the Dark. Not of the shadow. Not unless it hurt.

He guessed this one checked out on that front, at least.

Pain was necessary. Pain was useful. Pain was one of the things he _should_ be feeling. That was something he had to remind himself far more often than he'd care to note.

He'd felt this way since the cave. Since _before,_ when his own blue kyber crystal exploded _( ~~since the temple did~~ )._ Felt wrung out. Emptied at the core, just like this place, incapable of mustering even the things he wanted— _needed_ to feel. Where all the strong emotions he'd felt before had been, only a kind of dull numbness comparable to trying to find sensation in a limb right after it'd been broken.

He didn't care for the snow, at least. That was something he could feel rather negative about.

If his face were uncovered his breath, visible like white mist under the dim overhead lights, might've given him a way to count the time. As it was, he didn't know how long he stood there, frozen solid, buried underneath his mask and his heavy robes and his own thoughts; staring at Hux's back as the redhead stared, troubled but unconcerned, up an out through that gaping unnatural opening at the starry tapestry of the universe.

Perhaps he wondered what it would have been like to be one of those lights in the night sky, flickering in and out in the face of darkness with no other care in the universe. Unknowing that any day now could be the day when stars can die.

Not very soon though; the Base was far from completed. Ilum, itself, hadn't been whole to begin with. It had been an Imperial mine, after all, and after the war once the remnants got to it they left it fractured. Incomplete. A whole chunk of it missing on one side like a fruit with a bite taken out of it, carelessly thrown away to rot afterward because there was no one else left alive who cared enough to try and reclaim it.

His grandfather might've seen it, once, when it was whole. It'd already been like this, when Ben was a child.

This viewing spot would disappear too, when the Base was completed. Covered and dissolved in metal, power, purpose and dissent.

Even now, so early into construction, steel had begun creeping in at the edges of the chasm that snow hadn't yet covered again. It struck Kylo then that instead of looking like a parasite, invading, it seemed to him just like the substance that seeped out from unripe fruit at the hanging gardens when Ben had tried to bite it as a boy. The one that felt and tasted like glue, as if trying in vain to mend what others had broken, yet at the same time discourage anyone else from taking another bite.

Between it and the snow, Kylo felt chilled to the bone, even so far from the edge of that chasm. Hux stood directly before it, the handrail as his sole protection; hadn't moved in far too long.

Kylo didn't dare take a step closer yet. Something told him if he chose to stand there and then looked below to the black bottomless abyss, he might just lose it.

…A week had passed since that first inevitable meeting that had left such a strangely memorable mark on Kylo's recent past.

A week had passed since that first meeting when Hux had been but an intriguing, infuriating stranger. He'd looked so _pale,_ under the horribly clinical white light of the holochamber, so isolated. Every word he spoke intoned with an almost dismissive declaration, flawlessly projecting confidence and indifference from every pore until the moment when the entrance closed behind them.

A week had passed since that first meeting. Since that question that wouldn't stop resonating, just like that fleeting flash of feeling had done. That flash that maybe hadn't ever been there. When Hux studied his mask for the very first time with a different instant aversion than most, as if studying the hidden face beneath. As if—

Seeing a ghost. That's what it felt like, staring at Hux now. Like seeing a ghost.

There had always been something about Hux.

About the way plans unfurled around him during meetings and debriefings, twisting broken edges around themselves; paths to turn enemies into advantages and setbacks into shortcuts.

About the way he seemed to think in indecipherable patterns.

There had always been _something_ about Hux that fascinated Kylo almost to the point of obsession from the very start—perhaps the moment onward that he met the General, perhaps even the months he spent here wallowing in indignation forming a separate image of the man he'd meet—for how very much the redhead played up to expectations whilst defying them in such a wild manner it was almost unbelievable.

It had been bad before, when he'd only been begrudgingly intrigued, but if anything it had only gotten worse since. It'd haunted his steps the whole week.

There had always been something about the youth unbecoming of his position, the strange outburst of kindnesses he performed for his peers. Lighter shifts, appropriate safety measures, timely meals and readily available medical personnel: those few essential gestures _no one else here_ bothered with, ones so _small_ not even the recipients seemed to notice any longer yet anything but inconsequential. About the stiffness in his mannerisms that seemed almost forced, the way he enunciated every word as if it were fact. About that stoic front he carried always which made everyone else take those small kindnesses for granted.

Something about the clear disconnect between mind and mouth, the mind itself from what little he'd glanced thus far functioning quite unlike any Kylo had ever seen, when he'd cared to look deep enough into what little slipped through the cracks in the wall.

About the sheer _velocity_ of his thoughts, that were so hard to follow one might as well not bother seeing as they tripped and scaled and _blended_ one into another to the point where the word ‘unrecognizable’ wouldn't do them justice any longer. How Hux could verbally filter them so thoroughly he had no idea.

About the _pallor of his skin,_ almost sickening. The organized chaos of his flickering Force signature which imitated his mess of a mind the scarce times the projected mental barricade faltered the way it did now, when Kylo chanced to be nearby but Hux thought himself alone. _(His mind eclipsed and closed off by a signature that shone so **dizzyingly** and blended seamlessly with it, feelings and thoughts bubbling just beneath the surface in a manner that a mildly bored Ben had once read of when transcribing outdated Jedi gibberish but didn't think he'd ever **see**. A personal plane where there's a place for everything and everything is in its place but only at surface level like ripples, pebbles in a pond, if you didn't care to note the ways that water looked like glass—)_

Something that almost didn't seem completely human to Kylo, at first. Didn't seem _alive_ at all, as bizarre as the thought may sound.

Something that reflected the light like a planet's moon, like an alight red starless sky.

Like brilliant bits of snow falling from that sky in a soundless burial.

…The kaleidoscopic effect of it was worse when held against the snowy background of the Base for that exact reason. It would blind him, if he thought to seek it out now, if he stared at it directly for too long.

If he didn't know any better he'd think the man Force-Sensitive, because the General was _so obviously_ Force-Null and yet neither Kylo nor the boy he'd been had ever seen someone Force-Null with a signature quite as intrinsically _close_ to the Living Force beyond before: everything that was Hux brushing the edges of the self itself as if it sought to escape outward and—dissolve. But people didn't just…

 _An ice planet_ —Hux had said earlier during the very first debriefing Kylo had deigned to personally attend, whilst answering what was apparently a very repetitive question and half joking morbidly there at the end— _had always been the best and only option because the equipment needed refrigeration anyway and, besides, the temperature of the energy extracted from a living star could potentially be damaging to it if the set-up wasn't cold enough at least to freeze a human being to death right in their tracks._

And Kylo, who happened rarely to be paying attention at the time, was ready then and there to call Hux's bias and candidly specify to the rest of the meeting that _this_ particular choice had been made purely for _his_ benefit, a choice surely made out of spite with the sole purpose of getting to _him_ —

But he didn't. Glad to have his helmet on to hide behind for the palpable confusion and bewilderment the mere notion caused him a second later. A parade of emotions that surely would've shown on his face, the way most everything still did.

Now he thought about it, he didn't even know where the urge had come from in the first place. Hadn't ever before felt such a _need_ to share on a private joke that for all he knew he wasn't even _in_ on.

After all, he hadn't yet met Hux when the planet had been chosen. Even if he _had,_ it wasn't like Hux had any plausible way to know that, while his family had a history of despising sand—

Well, at the present moment _that_ shouldn't matter. Because here was the perfect opportunity for Kylo to finally satiate this burning curiosity, and he certainly _would_ have to get closer to that same deathly chilling snow the man himself had practically boasted of—that is, if he wanted to get anywhere closer to Hux.

* * *

**… … …** What Was Once Ilum - Starkiller Base Planning Site, 01:45 AM Standard Time. 29 ABY, About A Year After Ben Solo's Fall To The Dark Side / Three Weeks After The Day Kylo Ren Officially Met Armitage Hux **… … …**

* * *

A man spoke through an old comm device connected by a wire to yet another device by far more complicated, hidden behind an unassuming panel and now also a brand new framed sketch he'd hung over it in the wall; an apology gift, the one who'd given said sketch to him shrugged off. Both devices in question matched its newness, as they were in incredible conditions for their age, but the splash of vibrant colour coating the paper shattered any kind of harmony that might've been achieved.

One arm supported him against said wall, tense but deceivingly still, the other held down the transmission button.

His voice was sharp, concise and to the point.

His hands were trembling.

"We have a problem."

* * *

**… … …** What Was Once Ilum - Starkiller Base Planning Site, 03:38 PM Standard Time. 29 ABY, About A Year After Ben Solo's Fall To The Dark Side / Two Weeks After The Day Kylo Ren Officially Met Armitage Hux **… … …**

* * *

Kylo Ren has always _abhorred **snow**._

It felt _good,_ to think of it that way. _Validating_ almost, in a very twisted way.

If he felt something, if he _disliked_ something as strongly as to really truly _hate_ it… then he had to have existed always, too, somewhere deep within Ben Solo.

…See, for some bizarre reason not even he himself could hope to explain or comprehend, Ben Solo had always hated snow with the same burning passion that drove Kylo to the Dark. It was one of a few aspects he'd willingly let himself keep. It'd felt _his,_ more than it had ever felt Ben's.

Now though, thrust practically into the same position as just a week before, Kylo set the intrinsic dislike aside as best he could and willingly chose to step closer to it _again._ To the General. Or rather to this man that seemed all the worse for wear when compared to barely a week prior and certainly didn't _look_ the part: the sunlight a spotlight made to highlight the hollow of his cheek and sleepless bruising under his eyes, details the darkness knew well how to conceal.

All the same, whoever he was Kylo _wanted to meet him._ So he advanced. Slowly, stealthily, like the first time he'd tried to sneak up on Hux a week ago.

He'd been spotted almost immediately then, despite having the familiar cover of darkness in his favor too when now the afternoon light of a star soon to perish reflecting off metal under a fresh white coating of snow had taken such advantages away. Had all but forgotten in his haste to dampen his footsteps and cloak himself in the all-concealing shadows of the Force instead and so with as noticeable a presence as the new Master of the Knights of Ren portends he had been busted before he could ever start trying. Just as he'd grabbed the handrail, had half a thought to open his mouth and kick-start the conversation, the General let go of it as if electrified and then mustering a withering glare walked stiffly away without having exchanged a single word. Yet despite this now he was being more successful by leaps and bounds.

Through no improvement of his own though; Hux seemed so out of sorts the man probably wouldn't have noticed his presence if he'd been stomping towards him. Wouldn't have noticed for the life of him if the Emperor's black bones had up and appeared beside him.

He came to a stop a good few steps behind instead of approaching directly like he'd made the mistake of trying before. Last time, Hux had reacted badly to stealth.

But that wasn't why he'd stopped.

He stopped walking now because something deep inside himself had been abruptly startled into attention, coerced into deeply fearing somehow that if he got any closer the man would simply— _unravel._

He kicked the thought away. Violently. The same way he'd done last week. The shadowy outline of something he hadn't even known was there struggling to get through his own mental blocks.

What should he _care,_ if Hux unraveled? What should he _do,_ if it truly were to happen?

Nothing, that's what.

There was nothing _he_ could do, either way. Someone's signature shouldn't dissolve until they died. If what little he remembered of everything Ben had read was factually correct something like _this_ hadn't happened in centuries, if ever. His training didn't extend that far _( ~~**not his own** , at the very least ~~)_. And the strange helplessness of it made him want to hate himself and hate the redhead and hate the universe, all at once. A fierce and open kind of hate.

At once, the air around him thinned.

Unexpectedly, he felt a sharp _something_ piercing deep into his chest.

Because many people died without knowing just how much being a gifted mind reader sometimes entailed and there were days Ben Solo had sincerely envied them that mercy.

Because, without realizing it, Hux had taken the distant shadow of not-quite-a-memory in the back of his own mind and cast it into starlight.

This close, the very outline of the man appeared to blur impossibly. The background changing like an incredibly fast slideshow from the eternal black of space to a haunting electric _red_ to a starlit gray again then snapping back to a void-like black. He blinked rapidly and it was gone, replaced by as proper an approximation of an afternoon sky as a grand opening in a cavern could portray. He struggled to convince himself that none of it had been real.

 _It's so heavy under stone._ Hux's mind whispered, when Kylo was within arm's reach, almost close enough to touch.

And it woke him up from his own daze because there was a story, there. The uncomfortable echoes of another undecipherable memory or two of the redhead's own, just out of reach from Kylo. Unspoken words resounding in the way Hux's breathing and heartbeat were slightly out of sync, this close, the way they hitched before the man's eyes analyzed a nonexistent horizon with the inaudible snap of an internal fracture in that insurmountable wall of his. Not really seeing.

The way he was sweating raindrops even in the unbearable cold, holding on to the handrail for dear life with knuckles that under the gloves must've been colored ashen white.

 _It's so heavy under stone,_ there was an undertone of panic to it, now he was looking for it, _likewaterbutworse and we are so far down within Ican'tbreathe I can't…_

Hux's mind was always strange to him, in the way it functioned. The way it increasingly lost coherence the more he tried to read it _( ~~like a defense mechanism~~ )._ The old Jedi had said nothing of this, as they had said nothing of Force-Nulls somehow _conflicting with the Force_ and implicitly winning through continued existence alone—so Kylo had asked himself often throughout the course of the past two weeks, the latter specially, if this was just how geniuses thought.

Kylo had never met one, but begrudging as he was to admit it Hux appeared to fit the description far too well, if he were giving the entirety of the man's work an unbiased view.

He was brilliant, although perhaps in a different way than Kylo originally thought. Perhaps in the deliberate way that comets are brilliant, in the way their own light slowly tore them apart.

The various implications stemming from the notion filled Ben with dread and Kylo didn't like thinking about it overmuch either, so he attuned their minds again as best as the _sheer incompatibility_ would allow and worked on solving the worryingly increasing input delay however he could.

It was slow now, that faster-than-light-travel mind. Slow as if wading through molasses or swimming to the surface from the deepest reaches of the ocean, not nearly fast enough to get there. Slow as if perhaps unable to swim at all; trapped at the bottom. A barely there thing that had blocked all the panic somewhere hidden, frozen it, actively refused to process anything for fear it might just be enough to trigger the breakdown that would surely follow.

He often saw this behavior back home. Or well not _quite_ this, he mentally corrected himself, as he had already learned well enough how Hux's method of doing things would often differ from most people's in the same way nobody but Han Solo and perhaps Uncle Chewie could ever understand the Falcon's makeshift hyperspace engines—but still _Kylo_ knew what this was, if anything else. He'd seen it often enough in Rebel war veterans, had already started noting it in subtle hints within some of the Imperials too.

People ~~back home~~ _( ~~where Ben belonged~~ )_ _in New Republican territory_ had always been… not outright _obvious,_ exactly, but at the very least somewhat _open_ about their feelings and experiences during the war. Though occasionally wary or distrustful or unwilling to do so, people still _talked_ to one another. They shared and they opened up and _they were sentient beings._ It was what he still perceived as normal. It wasn't a taboo there, to have loved ones. It wasn't a taboo there, to be an individual at all.

His eyes tended to deceive him, when it came to the Force, but his other senses had sharpened as a result. Thanks to his brand of abilities and somewhat natural affinity for the Dark it had been easy for him to tell, even when he'd been young and small, when someone or something had been irrevocably tainted by grief. By hate. By war.

It nearly drove him insane. Many nowadays thought paper was useless but—for a million reasons he could never articulate because they tasted of dream-like lighting and sacrifice and unremembered blaster fire that no matter how many times he jumped in the way _never hit **him**_ —Ben always felt a strange kinship with it. He used to sketch the people he met, both physically and mentally, with thought and pen. It started as an outlet and became a quirk of his, an urge Kylo couldn't yet quite shake off; hadn't tried as strongly as he might've with anything else, because it often remained useful to note the ones that came out slightly darker in shading when compared to the rest.

Ben's Uncle. Lando and Chewie too. Ben's own mother and father, and even some of the older teens back at the New Jedi. Back then, he hadn't truly understood the depths it went. Hadn't learned to embrace the phantom that haunted his legacy, to wield it in his favor during a fight like yet another weapon. He was just a boy putting pen to paper and wondering frustratingly _why his subconscious still insisted on **coloring** people differently **even when he used no colors at all**._

So he'd asked Luke, once. And as with basically everything else Luke had answered.

He'd later asked ~~his mother~~ _( ~~Ben's mother~~ ) Leia Organa_ once—in a far rarer occurrence and more out of curiosity really—if the other side could've possibly felt a similar loss; and she had explained to him then, patiently but grave, that Imperials felt less. That Imperials and the derivative there-of had been programmed, either from birth or later in life, not to feel or be very much at all.

She had been wrong, of course, about the underlying state of things. Oh, he could see where she was coming from: most Imperial veterans he'd met thus far in the Order had shone so little that superficially they barely seemed to have a signature in the Force at all, and people _from_ the Order itself like washed out clothing rarely showed color in anything but faded shades. He'd even thought at first that maybe she'd had the right idea, but then he met _Hux_ —and now he thought he could see the truth for himself.

His Master had not informed him of the situation, probably had no knowledge of it, and the vivid colors so carefully hidden away were only visible during these chance occasions when the facade to Hux's metaphysical blockade converted back from stone or steel to glass.

It wasn't that Imperials and those raised with a similar mindset _felt less, were less,_ it was just that—for their own survival and that of their ideals and that of their peers—they'd simply been taught to hide it better.

Imperial or Rebel or something completely different an episode like this one wasn't ever _pretty_ to witness from anyone, to put it mildly, and he found himself inexplicably alarmed when yet another fracture came to existence all on its own in Hux's personal wall.

_That shouldn't be there._

That shouldn't be there. His mind kept telling him that, the _Force_ kept telling him that, but hell if he knew what it was that it meant, _because people didn't spontaneously—_

And then the wall itself broke.

He didn't even get to finish the thought.

It broke. Snapped him right back from wherever in the past he'd gone to. Came crumbling down with the quiet of a grip that tightened. Of eyes that dulled, seeming far more the part of green light reflecting off broken glass.

With the subtle explosion of a breath that hitched, but didn't immediately resume.

_( **People didn't** — Ben reassured himself internally, a bit desperately. **People didn't just** —)_

It _broke_ and, although the event wasn't quite as literal as all that, it was the only way he could think to perceive it. The clues all slitting suddenly into place in his own head when everything in Hux's seemed abruptly—if only for a small moment in time—to have been thrust out of it.

Hux's very core just— _came apart,_ for the fraction of a second. Ben hadn't even the fleeting chance to truly panic, since it reconstructed itself immediately after, and at its center it _gleamed;_ a skeleton of broken starlight, a comet's tail, snapped back into existence after having—if only for that second—fizzled out.

But a single second of that view was all he himself needed to get a glace within.

It was—

He couldn't even begin to describe it.

It was unnatural. Like before, only worse, _so much worse._

How did that saying of Luke's went, missing the forest for the trees?

He'd seen cracks, before. Mere cracks were normal, most everyone had them, he himself had more than most and no one back home had really known why, but this—

Someplace secluded at the back of Kylo Ren's mind, Ben Solo was _scared._ Terrified, really. Scared and truly panicking.

_Your signature is broken._ he wanted to say, suddenly, with no good reason at all and an urgency that _did_ manage to scare even him.

_(Your signature is breaking, Hux. Your **very being** is breaking. ~~Your **soul** is **breaking**! ~~ Why—? How are you even—?)_

Hux's signature always stood out really, before he'd known this, like a lit beacon in the burned out sea of the crowd. Because it'd been _wild_ as a raging fire but it didn't _seem_ so.

Hux seemed unfettered, indeed, and at times it certainly _felt_ that way. As if there'd been an invisible barrier. A dam, to keep it all from overflowing. To keep whatever was within at bay.

Hux appeared unfeeling yet he seemingly felt so _strongly,_ sometimes during the past weeks, so sudden and about so many things at once—that he projected them out and Kylo could almost feel them too, without even trying to, and yet could never decipher them. Akin to a body of water, calm at a glance, but look beneath the surface and there's a multitude of currents running parallel to one another; savage and human and sharp like a blade. Almost truly like broken glass, as if his soul were just a myriad of scattered pieces that seemed cohesive only when it wasn't obvious that they'd been flung together in a hazardous manner: the eye of a raging storm, showing hints at times of what lie beyond.

This was the first time he happened to _see_ the actual storm though, and it'd been so surprising Kylo's hand sputtered to a halt where it'd been instinctively reaching towards the man, unable to pinpoint cause nor reason for what he was seeing—but over the years from now he'd learn that, as bizarre as it is and through the inherent knowledge that a person's _soul_ shouldn't look like _that,_ this stable balance of unstable buffers is just who _Hux_ is.

Over the years too, as it often happens, he'd start noticing a pattern.

A person's signature might well be their soul, and as such it mirrors their life. A person's signature could tell you _a lot_ about who they are if you knew how to interpret it, Ben was speaking from experience.

His father's signature had sung with the earthy purr of Corellian starship engines on mid flight and the texture of purple furred dice and something like an enticing drink the taste of which Ben didn't have the reference to identify all tied up by a core of clouds free and brave and cocky, close and yet not: a living contradiction. His mother's was all just, vivid, beautiful hope and home and the adamant want for a future; the asteroids repurposed into New Alderaan wrung together with the fauna and flora of what he imagined to be the place itself mixed into a jungle around a building smooth like the Senate floor with a distant perfume of campfire smoke.

Luke Skywalker's had been spices and wonder and beneath it all sand with a hint of frost, Ben could flawlessly identify it from a crowd with his eyes closed since he was two. Kylo would never forget the way that, nearing the end, the frost had covered everything else.

His own. His own he hadn't dared glace too deeply at since he'd turned but he knew something about it had inevitably changed since then. It'd broken, too, in many places; mended in others, like there were parts of him that had always belonged in the Dark.

A person's signature was deeply personal, and to them all of it _meant_ something.

Present in Hux's, disregarding the storm, behind a faint cyan blue barrier and beneath blue-green fog over murky gray superficial waters reflecting in some places a royal violet glow, there was just this red abstract expression of the _burning drive_ to always have more than one backup plan. Always have a contingency. A giant spiral of safety nets for safety nets, so like a spider's web, all originating from someone who'd started out with nothing. Who reached out and aggressively planned and created and _build,_ to help him survive in a ruthless galaxy, so he wouldn't have to worry about having nothing ever again. Not him, nor anyone else he'd taken as an extension of himself.

But Kylo wouldn't have the benefit of hindsight yet. Wouldn't understand how, when Hux's eyes fell to him, it was like someone flipped a switch.

Even through the fog of exhaustion, palpable as panic once he was actively searching for it, he could feel Hux's mind retreating inward. Shutting him _Out,_ the same way he'd unconsciously halted his hand, shunned his own signature from it as if to shield it from the same fate. It seemed to function, yet again. Analyzing and assessing, separating the pieces that wouldn't fit.

There was a slight lag to the well-oiled machine, but something within him _that shouldn't exist_ floored with relief at the gradual return of Hux's most familiar mental patterns. Wild, fast, brutal pragmatism.

Remember all the talk earlier about first impressions?

Well better forget about the other two, because this is the good one.

His impression, now, the _real_ first impression and the only glimpse he thought he'd ever get, was—justifiably and morbidly, fascinatingly so—that the man's mind was somehow purposefully tearing his signature apart to smaller and yet smaller bits and pieces: particles upon atoms, molecules snapping themselves open on their way to an imminent nuclear explosion.

Excising its own being, searching for a way to somehow reduce itself to its raw key components so that it could properly rearrange into a chaotic sort of order that only made sense to the man himself; the result a spider's web of sharp jagged shards melting into each other. Attempting, impossibly, to fit together.

Stuck in a tugging match. Unable to be fixed. Unable to reform.

Unable to be read with any amount of ease, confidence or accuracy _for how utterly shattered it was._ Snarls of something like genuine thought and emotion bleeding through frayed edges occasionally, crude and brutal like a vibroblade stab wound.

Not that _that_ had stopped Kylo from trying to figure out the fascinating pattern. Whatever it was before it became this, whatever it was desperately _(with a primal sort of resigned purpose, anxious worry and weaponized **fear** all but an unreachable stem underneath it all)_ trying to become. At times slowly, agonizingly succeeding before the progress halted automatically and it was all brought back to what he _guessed,_ at the time, was square one.

A rapid river to a pond or a lake or a _sea,_ and back again; a body of water indeed, made off of orange-red liquefying glass instead like a dying sky coalescing somehow into halfway molten lava. Undisturbed and unperturbed only at the surface but more and more cracked by its own currents the further down you went until it was impossible to go further without danger of drowning yourself.

And Hux?

Hux was, _perpetually,_ drowning.

As someone blessed by the Force itself Ben couldn't understand, wouldn't ever understand not truly, how anyone could possibly _live_ like this. The sheer prospect of it horrified him. And although Kylo would come to accept it in time as something he couldn't change, he'd never _understand,_ either.

That impression would change years down the line in many ways but, at its core, retain the same essentials still.

"General…" Kylo started to ask, but never finished. Ben finished for him. "Hux?"

And then there had been a sharp shift. A turn to the left that made the change in demeanor all the more jarring.

In the blink of an eye Hux went from vulnerable and frightened man to General Hux, fearless and powerful representative of the First Order.

The General— _Hux_ didn't seem affected, no fear lingering in his stance, no trace of inner conflict or even conflict of any kind.

Only rain, calm gray waters and a light blue mist, the surface shining green with a hint of violet and no trace of red.

But Kylo knew better than to take him at surface level.

The redhead lived within a circle of backstabbers, actors and pretenders where megalomania abounded; an environment like that breaks everyone it doesn't warp.

Kylo may have experienced it from afar—distant, other, _separate_ —but Hux was stuck within. A man the likes of him would _know_ how to hide, to have survived and even thrived, to have come this far and both outwardly and inwardly appear unscathed. Kylo thinks he perceived that far earlier than it'd been spelled out for him in bold letters.

Over the years Kylo would come to learn that Hux often wears masks and plays parts without physically disguising himself at all, and he'd suspected it beforehand, but it wasn't until this moment that Ben ever had the chance to _internalize_ exactly how adept Hux was at it.

Had he not cared enough to watch—been mesmerized by what he saw and couldn't see and _couldn't be there_ —he never would've suspected a thing.

Were he unable to feel Hux's phantom pain with every breath—because, subconsciously, he was _actively trying to ease it,_ a similar way his Uncle did for him, the way he'd been _taught to_ —he might've never known there was anything worth trying to find.

They stood silent for another moment, both overly conscious of the other: Hux lost in some nonexistent horizon, Kylo staring at him searching for something still far out of his own reach, and then the both of them just— _staring_ at each other. Stuck in some skewed staring contest where only one of the participants would know the result.

_(Ben was only somewhat thankful the one to know would be himself.)_

Kylo didn't have any particular ability to read people, none beyond the obvious, not if he wasn't close enough to touch at least. And, obviously too, Hux was far harder than most to decode even now that he _was._

Now he knew why. A broken lock, immune to his particular brand of key.

In the better days, Kylo had no idea what the man was thinking. In the worst of them, he had no idea if Hux was—consciously— _thinking_ at all, instead of trusting automation to do the job for him. This one moment put all those bad days to shame.

_Do I know you?_

It would've been a meaningless question, had it come from anyone else at any other time. An abnormal inquiry, yes, but meaningless. It wouldn't have echoed so strongly within him, like sound hopelessly trying to pull through when thrust against an empty void.

But Hux's gaze had been _empty,_ when he'd said it. Empty but knowing as he lifted his head but a challenging inch the same way he did now so that they could—somehow—see eye to eye. Empty when it _shouldn't be._ Empty of anything but the same morbid curiosity Kylo himself felt, and yet a certainty.

A certainty of the answer that they seemed to share and neither of them should feel.

_Do I **know** you?_

_(It should be impossible but Kylo **knew** him. Knew him like he knows his saber or the back of his hand. Knew **what he could've been** , maybe. Knew **what he should be** , and the Force and Ben both kept on saying with increasing alarm that whatever it was **it wasn't this**.)_

Hux, for his part, seemed to have found his words just as Kylo lost his. The redhead deliberately relaxed his grip on the handrail then straightened his posture and put on his polite grin, sharp as a tack.

Not the polite _almost smile,_ the encouraging one Kylo saw him give one of the cadets during an evaluation a few days ago, a fierce black-haired young girl flanking an armored Captain, when he'd thought no one was looking; but the sharp one ridden by contempt that he wore for most of his senior officers in terms of age only. The one Kylo knows is a complete farce.

Like that earlier flash of genuineness, it was gone in an instant.

A single red eyebrow rose critically, and Kylo knew with sudden certainty that he was about to be insulted.

 _"Lord Ren."_ The makeshift title might as well have been spit in his face, so thinly veiled was the sarcastic disdain. "Come to graze us with your presence from above, have you? Though with how little actual work you contribute to the cause I should think you'll have enough free time to drop by more often, or actually pay attention during what scarce meetings you _do_ attend."

Kylo wanted to rage, to hit back, to quite literally _hit Hux._ Choke him maybe. It was an instant response, an instinctive irrational thing of the shadow now ingrained within him. He wanted to respond, in some way, to the first of many obvious provocations over the years. The one that had come out of nowhere like a defense mechanism.

And yet, as he had the rare foresight to realize then, that might've been exactly what Hux wanted him to do… for some reason he couldn't for the life of him begin to comprehend.

So he tried something different, for once. Set an example for the new pattern to follow.

He pushed the rage to rest with the memory of what he'd just witnessed, just barely, and reached for a kind of olive branch with an equally as sarcastic response of his own.

Through the voice modulator most of his tone was lost in translation, but he'd have liked to believe enough of the underlying meaning got through.

"I wouldn't say that I'm _above_ you, in the ways you seem to think. In rank least of all, since as it happens I am _not yet_ part of the First Order in any official capacity and am therefore not obligated to contribute anything." He thought about halting there. He'd said his piece, and yet— "Concerning… other matters, I'd rather say we're in equal footing, if that'd make you stop avoiding me so eagerly."

Perhaps it'd been such an effective taunt on Hux's part precisely because of that. Because Kylo wasn't above him but they _weren't_ in equal footing. Not yet. Because perhaps, deep down, Kylo secretly resented how long and hard Hux appeared to work with the strength of full conviction when he himself had been cast adrift. Barely hearing a word from his new Master in the two months and a half he'd spent here on what would someday become Starkiller Base. On this place that was no longer Ilum.

Barely hearing a word in the four months that came before, being continually reassigned from ship to ship for a variety of reasons like a pet to be returned or some bothersome pest or an unwanted orphan. Five really since he passed what he thought then to be his ultimate test and wind up destroying the cave in the process.

More than a year since the decision had been made for him to turn from the Light.

Kylo had spent his time those last four months before arriving here training and meditating and half heartedly, with an admitted idleness, learning about the First Order. As much as would be expected of him, but generally doing not nearly enough to feel like he belonged.

Although, he'd started to doubt he'd ever _belong_ anywhere, again. In the purest sense of the word.

Had known he wouldn't, since that first time he truly saw _himself_ in the mirror, instead of staring down Ben Solo's phantom.

He'd taken refuge in it, perhaps, when he still could. The same way he learned to take refuge in the mask he now wore. The one that Hux rendered useless.

The one that Hux rendered useless in much the same manner he did now, that one eyebrow coming right back down to join its next of kin in a somewhat blindsided though still vaguely disapproving frown at the not entirely hostile response.

Kylo had often half jokingly wondered during the past couple of weeks, whenever he was flat out of subjects to entertain himself with and the boredom reached its peak, just how long it had taken Hux to manage to mix practically every possible expression with disapproval, or if it'd come naturally to him from the very start.

He'd been half-inclined to think the man wouldn't be able to separate them even if he _wanted_ to, during those moments. And the baseless conjecture had amused him at the time, but now he'd seen what lie beneath that'd just be… sad, maybe.

Not that their present situation was anything resembling ideal to breach the subject. Breach _any_ subject, actually.

There was still an electrified tension in the air, lightning hot and dangerous, and Kylo had the feeling all it would take was one wrong word or move on his part to set the entire thing off.

Especially because the man he was speaking to was eyeing him like he was just waiting for the opportunity to strike first, before Kylo could think to. Waiting for a sign that he'd _have_ to.

Kylo also often entertained the thought the General might be delusional, because he was, in certain ways, both the most perceptive and unperceptive man the Knight of Ren had ever met.

"I am hardly _fleeing_ from you. Where did you even come from?" The General apparently couldn't help but correct at last, after a beat of silence. Quicker perhaps than he'd intended to, by the manner his voice recovered its lost contempt right after. "What are you dwelling upon with such a thoughtful complexion all of a sudden, anyway?"

Hux quizzed him, the second question as sickeningly sweet as Kylo had heard the song of a perching Arkanisian shark could be, when one of the man's seniors had made the unflattering mental comparison. Questioning also his continued presence in the premises. All but physically restraining himself from tacking on the scalding ‘don't hurt yourself’ there at the end.

And although Kylo resented the implication that he wouldn't be capable of deeper thought process than a limpet, as Hux's surface mind was also kind enough to tell, he appreciated the fact that it went unsaid.

He still felt the sudden need to destabilize the man in retaliation though. Startle him. Rattle him.

And he already knew scatting comments of his own wouldn't accomplish that much, so he killed two birds with one stone and borrowed a lesson from Han Solo's teachings:

"Well, General, pardon my being so daring, but with all due respect seeing you so thoroughly dashing gives the mind much-needed fuel to think."

He willingly channeled Ben, for the first time in about a year, went by the seat of his pants and made a flirtatious remark that positively destroyed the tension. If only for how very flat it fell.

It'd achieved its objective of catching Hux entirely by surprise in a somewhat positive way though, apparently. The redhead seemingly finding himself almost _half-genuinely grinning_ at the sheer embarrassing ridiculousness of how the whole stupid debacle sounded through the ominous voice modulator for the fraction of a second it took him to become aware of it and so correct his expression back into that perpetual frown halfway through.

"You're not serious." Hux said, as if proud of himself for knowing that much, and his posture didn't seem as rigid anymore. Not so much like he was forcing himself to remain still. There was barely a trace of animosity to it left, an edge that was not purposeful, but perhaps only a permanent fixture of the man himself. "But I do not believe you're tooling with me, either."

 _Holy Force,_ he'd practically made Hux smile.

Kylo felt, oddly, like he'd just accomplished something incredible. Endorphins went _flying_ through his veins all of a sudden and he thanked the Force for his helmet because he _himself_ was probably grinning like an idiot.

"Hardly." He let that be all the response he'd give to that. Thanking the Force also for the neutrality conveyed by a vocoder.

Honestly, could anyone blame him? He'd barely seen Hux _emote_ since he met the guy, and all of it had looked _so fake._

He'd only seen Hux's almost-smile a grand total of _once_ before. And in a way it felt like he'd _never seen it for himself,_ not directly, how could he?

"I do believe that is what for us in civilized society qualifies as a ‘joke’ of the harmless variety, General." He couldn't help himself but add. Letting Ben take over, if only slightly, was becoming addictive rather fast. The voice modulator did but make him more bold. He'd need to stop doing it soon. "A lost ancient art around these parts, I'm certain."

 _"Hardly."_ Hux mocked, not playfully but not unkindly, and this time the slightly gentler grin was _most definitely there._

_Score!_

He felt accomplished all over again, then went right back to striving for more. Wanting to see it _stay._

He needed to leave, now. All of this abrupt positive reinforcement was getting to his head. Ben's head. Whatever.

"We'll have to cut this short. I'm scheduled for another meeting soon and this place won't build itself. Have a good evening, Ren."

Luckily Hux beat him to the punch, with a curt nod and that professional neutral expression sliding right back into place, the last part added on almost warily. Because he's certain he himself never _would've_ left, otherwise. He'd never been good at practicing self-restraint of any kind.

He'd never had Hux's polite faux gentle smile directed at _him,_ either, before today. But already when the General turned around Kylo couldn't help feeling like it'd been a long time since, and as fleeting as it had been he inexplicably wanted the man to do it again:

To _smile,_ and do it properly this time. Or to at least talk to him at all.

And, like he said, he was never any good at practicing restraint.

"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you're constructing." He couldn't help but remark casually, grasping at straws, before Hux could make yet another smooth getaway. He'd been thinking it the whole week really, and when else would he get the chance to say it? "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force."

By the way the man's signature visibly bristled before all but closing off completely once again, that had been entirely the wrong thing to say.

He'd evidently hit a nerve without meaning to.

He expected the man to turn to him in a fit of rage. To yell at him. To threaten him. To lose that hard-won neutral composure he'd been practically boasting of since Kylo had met him in a much different manner than he had when he thought himself alone and _Suicidally try to tear the Knight's throat out withhisteeth_ —because for a moment there he certainly seemed to be considering the pros and cons of it, even if he'd been doing it at something approaching hyperspeed.

Truthfully, each and every one of those responses was akin to something a sudden spike in aggression of this magnitude would portend.

He'd been expecting anything but what actually came to pass.

Hux's hands had clenched at his sides, eyes narrowed and dark with a furious sort of shadow, yet that was the only thing that gave the sentiment away. The inner wall had risen anew, imposing and impenetrable. The man grinned again at him, a sharp predatory gleam of teeth exposed as he chuckled, something that could have been a smile but most certainly _wasn't anymore_ plastered on his face. Too bright and wide to be seen as anything but false and just a touch feral.

Then that chuckle rose in volume until it had turned to a burst of mad laughter.

The same second it turned unhinged was also the one Kylo discerned the man was laughing _at him._ And he had the General up by the collar of his undercoat and a couple meters off the ground in a fit of rage before he was conscious of having moved.

So _this_ was what it took to make him laugh.

"My apologies." The redhead ground out once he had recovered some semblance of composure. There was no trace of fear nor genuine regret to it, an unshakeable neutrality to his voice. No trace of anything but amusement to his features. His eyes were a rather hypnotizing shade of green. "I thought you'd made another joke."

"I didn't." Kylo cautioned threateningly.

"Apparently I continually fall short of comprehending you." Hux answered in kind agreeably. "It is merely that I find your lack of faith disturbing."

"I find the excess of it short-sighted."

He'd spoken before he thought to, but then again it _was_ the truth.

Wasn't it excess of faith in the Light, that had been Ben's old Master's downfall?

"Interesting views, for a Force-User."

Kylo lift him higher, his tone a crisp growl turning to a crackle through the voice modulator. "We are _not_ talking about the Force."

"No, and I assure you I've no need of it. This machine you so mock will bring us all order and peace. Your Force cannot compare with the power to destroy worlds and through the power I _will_ possess, the galaxy will be set free." The General affirmed. Daringly, fearlessly. "You'd do well to remember that."

Even as he struggled to pronounce them due to the tightening of the hold on his neck, it was clear that he believed each and every word. His conviction was a challenge and a provocation all its own.

The General was looking down on him even now, and Kylo had given him the perfect vantage point.

The Knight of Ren let go of the uniform's collar just as abruptly as he had seized it, and the man swayed slightly— _tellingly_ —on his feet, one hand grabbing for dear life onto the handrail automatically so as not to crumble and the other righting his collar then dusting it off in a most dignified manner. Chin raised high in defiance.

"Whatever you say, General."

_Yes, the man is definitely delusional._

Still, his belief in his cause was palpable, if anything else. Even if there was _something_ to the depth of that passion that Kylo couldn't quite bring himself to grasp.

And if he _did_ go to that meeting Hux had mentioned, and the one after, and the one _after…_ nobody remarked on it.

* * *

**… … …** An Unnamed Resistance Base - D'Qar, 03:38 AM Standard Time. 29 ABY, About A Year After Ben Solo's Fall To The Dark Side / Three Weeks After The Day Kylo Ren Officially Met Armitage Hux **… … …**

* * *

Deep in the guts of an abandoned Rebellion base turned Resistance base in the planet D'Qar, a man stood speaking frantically through an otherwise eerily silent commline, using a comm device connected by a wire to a machine large enough to serve as an average-sized table and mentally cursing up a storm.

"Answer me, answer me, _answer—"_ His tone had gone from demanding to concerned and back again in something like an emotional tailspin. The machine echoed his words in a warped distorted version that did nothing to hide the underlying rollercoaster. "I swear to—you can't just tell me to find someone else to do your job, someone else to talk to. You can't just tell me that you're replaceable and there's a real possibility _they'll kill you_ and then just—you can't just _say that_ and hang up on me you fragging nerfherder!"

The line remained dead but for a hint of static.

"You can't just tell me there's another Death Star in the making and you're going to let them make it and you're not going to tell me where it is _even to save your life_ then hang up on me, buddy," his tone had turned from desperately pleading to helplessly resigned. "That's not how friends work. Friends don't give each other heart attacks."

He waited a few more seconds. When there was still no answer on sight, he turned and kicked something as hard as he could.

There was a crack and then a crackle and then the line went dead on his side, too.

He cursed again.

Perfect. The Operator had been compromised and cut contact—cut the line quite literally, the Resistance member grimly suspected—there was apparently a Vader wannabe bad guy in current vicinity of said Spy with the right brand of cosmic space powers to back it up to boot and now he'd gone and damaged the machine that encrypted and decrypted their messages on his side in a fit of powerless frustration.

It'd been a fragile old thing to begin with. With the kind of luck he'd had today it was likely not even the _vocoder channel_ worked anymore.

"Welp, I had a nice flight." He told the BB unit worriedly rolling around on the floor as he fell back into his previously spinning chair after having stopped it with his heel, elbows colliding with the armrests. As if to mock him, the machine remained silent. "Better enjoy it while it lasts, 'cause General Organa is gonna have my head."

_(Just about five years and a couple months later, a long distance encrypted commlink from the Clone Wars subtly lit up with a new unread message and just as a former scavenger from Jakku excused herself to go deeper in on the recesses of the Falcon a BB unit approached its best friend and beeped in mild alarm. Said best friend turned towards it then stood up, casual clothes covered in engine grease, opened and halfway fixed control panel forgotten behind him. "A message from…? You ought to be kidding, we haven't gotten one of those in years.")_

_(The BB unit beeped again, rolling in circles around the man. By far more insistent and much more demanding this time. The pilot hastily welded together a couple more wires and then carelessly threw the panel shut, the questions everyone had for him interrupted by protests from Han Solo himself about said treatment of ‘his girl’. Uncaring of those in their curious gathered audience of former stormtrooper, Wookiee and Rebellion legend without a grasp of binary the pilot answered the droid. " **You** didn't get it? So **not** us, General Organa forwarded it then? …Geez, I heard you the first time. If it's so urgent show me it, buddy!")_

_(Poe Dameron stared at the screen. And stared. And stared. That didn't make the string of coordinates he was staring at make any more sense until it finally clicked. There was a decrypted blueprint attached. The added timestamp was about two hours off. "Holy…! BB connect me." The BB unit paced from side to side. Equally as disbelieving, the pilot shook his head. "One-way signal? What do you mean it's a one-way signal?! That can't…" BB-8 showed him the message's wavelength. Poe's protest trailed off immediately. "Shoot, he really **must** be desperate. Pass me on to the official channels then.")_

_("I don't care if it's unsafe and we've reason to believe they're still disconnected BB, just—Operator? Operator!" Rey had arrived back from wherever she had been, frown furrowed, her desert-tan face two shades paler than before. Her expression was something other, comparable only to the way she'd looked when she'd first held that lightsaber earlier back in Maz Kanata's Castle. "Attention. This is your Caller. I have an urgent communique for the Operator. There, I said it, **patch me through**!" Poe wasn't in the frame of mind to identify it because the whole of his attention was on the deafening silence emanating through the commline.)_

_("Proper procedure my ass, talk about timing!" Later, he would make a point to ask Rey what was wrong and somehow fix it. A point to talk to Finn about whatever he'd went through in the Stormtrooper Program and deprogramming. A point to be in awe of Chewbacca and come to terms with his disillusionment when it came to who Han Solo turned out to have become. Everything since the whole of Jakku had been suspiciously smooth sailing and Poe had promised himself that after they handed over their half of the map, he'd solve everything else. Now he had yet another deadline, and there was no time.)_

_("You're unbelievable you know that, SysOp? Five years of radio silence and then you give me this bantha fodder…" Now, Poe chuckled awkwardly as he started up all engines to the limit to the direction of those coordinates and begun thinking on how to explain to everyone else what was happening. Silently filing away all the baffled questions directed his way by everybody but a stock-still Rey as he mentally promised himself that when they finally blew that thing up and rescued Hugs—when, not if, he refused to think if—he'd tackle the guy again and make due on the nickname as soon as humanly possible after he'd decked him. "Buckle up everybody, someone call General Organa, we're deviating from the main flight plan. Gonna go destroy a weapon of mass destruction!")_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starkiller Base! Now with Handrail Technology™ — look into it, Imperials, save lives — brought to you courtesy of an Armitage Hux who actually gives a damn about the security hazard that's leaving REALLY DEEP CHASMS open for people (hint: his kids) to fall into if they aren't careful.
> 
> Yep, you read that right. Parent!Armitage Hux baby-proofed his weapon of mass destruction. You're welcome Solo, at least we know that you won't effortlessly fall to the abyss if someone stabs you.
> 
> As in, Hux actually left in a lot of design flaws. Purposefully. But he corrected the most glaringly obvious one, because f*ck you Snoke my people shall have the barest of relative security in the workplace, that's why.
> 
> I mean, security is important sure and so putting railings (balustrades?) everywhere is a necessary measure, but the way that Palpatine ‘died’ must literally be listed in the history books (holobooks?) that the FO children read. So, mostly security reasons. But also because f*ck you Snoke.
> 
> Also Hux is a _military man._ Who actively, aggressively refuses to be frightened by a spoiled brat in baggy black pajamas wearing a glorified black bucket over his head — superpowered or otherwise. Besides, you'll understand that when a creature in a mask _flirts_ with him of all things — and so blatantly too — the default reaction is "you're kidding me right." and of course Ben goes with it and says "yeah, haha, kidding" as a ‘sure let's go with that’ kind of reaction.
> 
> Also _also,_ believe it or not? The Blue Stone™ is actually an element from Canon, specifically a comic book. To put it a spoiler free way, it's something imbued with the Living Force that I believe muddled the rules a bit concerning who can and cannot be Force-Sensitive when. Though I _am_ stretching it's implied functionality just a tad to better fit the story. I know I've broken Canon in places (Armitage's first meeting with Rax, most of what happens in 19 ABY Arkanis which is our second biggest divergence point, Cardinal's backstory by giving him his name and a stormtrooper armor early and generally having inevitable things like Brendol's death happen early too, that's a trend…) but I wouldn't introduce something that big if it weren't Canon material. Let's just say I needed a workaround to pull one on the rules I've stablished for this universe and the comic gave me the idea of using the stone. Among other things.
> 
> Just for reference, in case Kylo wasn't clear enough here my interpretation of a signature/essence in the Force is basically the metaphysical manifestation of who a person is. The elements that represent them being vivid or faded depending on many things like how much individuality they have, how guarded they are and their overall intentions. You could say a person with vivid colors is someone whose true self is "closer to the surface" or to the Living Force's Light side. So yeah Imperials, the FO and sketchy characters in backwater planets are going to seem faded. Perhaps even darker.
> 
> In short, all living beings are just a tiny speck of Living Force trapped in a body, and when the body dies non Force-Sensitives dissolve into the Cosmic Force while Force-Sensitives whose soul is not too chaotic for it due to the Dark side can become what we call a Force ghost. A Force-Sensitive's soul is meant to last, to leave a clear imprint of their self in the Force itself. A non Force-Sensitive's isn't. That's why only Force-Sensitives have the potential to become Force ghosts.
> 
> (You thought the fic was named for a couple lines in the first chapter? Well, let's just say when something already happened it _has_ to occur, and when non Force-Sensitives tinker with causality the cosmos fights back against them very specifically. More on this later.)
> 
> …So, as you might've noticed, the end notes are now my free personal snark-slash-rambling zone? It's mostly so I can insert some humor into the plot seriousness and more importantly don't chat your ear off quite as much if you do comment. If you don't mind the rambling you're welcome to read as always and if you do you're welcome to skip too. You might miss some interesting insight and a good laugh though ;3
> 
> As you can see, the changes are accumulating: Rey had the Force and Force healing from the start, Phasma didn't open the shields, Poe was with everyone else all along instead of getting left behind in Jakku and nobody attacked Takodana, etc. I do wonder what Kylo changed… we'll see it soon. (In all fairness I love Ben Solo but I also shamelessly love Poe and Rey. I adore these characters equally, could you tell?)
> 
> As always, read you later! And sadly no promises about next week this time, because for me college has already started and getting this one out was already tough. But hey, this _is_ (and will remain) the longest chapter to date, so that ought to make due somewhat for the future delay.


	8. Cruel wind (something that had been there, could be there again)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Present Date And Location:**
> 
> * * *
> 
> **… … …** Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer Finalizer, 01:00 PM Standard Time. 34 ABY, Official Firing Date **… … …**
> 
> * * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Deep breath.*
> 
> Okay.
> 
> *Stares at the fourteen something word count*
> 
> This is 90 to 95% Kylux. I'm not even kidding, the draft calls this the Kylux chapter.
> 
> Come to think of it, 97% to 98% or so really, counting—an outside perspective and Ben Solo being Ben Solo. Between interactions and pining (mutual pining…?) I have filled my own shipping quota for now. I'm happy.
> 
> I think I could remove everything else that wasn't Kylux and we'd still end up above the ideal so I am invoking my emergency "a bit above limit but not above one thousand more just as long as it's Kylux" rule.
> 
> I have it in writing. Cut so many things in editing already seriously. The next chapter will likely be way shorter by comparison.
> 
> (If you're here from the first chapter for the Kylux and don't want to spoil yourself too much? Skip to the next scene from the "Nearing the End Of The Search" timestamp.)
> 
>  _Mind the tags._ Also feel free to rest at the timeline page break of your convenience. There be bonus shipping snacks.
> 
> That's it, enjoy!

* * *

**… … …** Luke Skywalker's Temple Of The New Jedi, 11:00 AM Standard Time. 28 ABY, An Indeterminate Amount Of Time Before Ben Solo's Fall To The Dark Side **… … …**

* * *

The sun was high in the sky, reflecting off the rippling waters of the riverside. The weather was the kind most people would consider perfect to go out and have some lemonade and—definitely sweating but not yet breathing hard—Ben Solo, who upon being asked who his grandfather was might've named Bail Organa, would've agreed with them wholeheartedly in a heartbeat if he weren't too busy clumsily dodging yet another hit from a sword seemingly set on meeting flesh.

He stumbled on a moderate sized rock, angrily contemplated using the Force to send it flying to the shore instead of flinging it at his present attacker. This second of novice hesitation might've been taken advantage of by a more experience fighter—but as it was he managed to parry the next thrust in time, just barely, and use the movement to get behind his aggressor in the same motion.

He pressed his own sword diagonally to their neck, took advantage of the wooden nature of the blade to grip both sides of it in an illegal maneuver and force his adversary to take a step backwards. Their back ended up against his chest; white hair made up in braids colliding softly with the space beneath his chin in what, were both fighters serious, might've swiftly become a headbutt. He grinned.

"What, are you trying to _choke_ me?"

The girl he was presently practicing with bantered good-naturedly, her familiar signature _(fierce orange challenge, green unexplored jungles and ominous black bells)_ flared up: a mix of amused at his antics and frustration at her apparent loss. Her sword lied on the ground where it had fallen.

"Do you _want_ me to try?"

He playfully tightened his hold so that the wood stopped just short of her throat, the blunt surface of the blade nearly meeting that of her neck. It might've been a threatening gesture if it hadn't earned him a surprised laugh.

"That is a _very curious_ thing to ask, weirdo!"

Before he could think of an appropriately smug response she stepped on his left foot, kicked his ankle with her heel. He couldn't recover his footing fast enough. She took his right hand, twisted his wrist, eagerly reversing their positions. He fell.

"Eyes off the sword, Ben—and don't get cocky. Don't take your attention off the enemy; they won't be bothering to play around with you."

Uncle— _Master_ Luke's exasperated but also amused advice came far too late. Before Ben knew it he was on the ground, his sparring partner standing proud, the tip of the blade that had been treasonously taken from him teasing the tip of his nose in a mocking fashion.

"You show him Voe!"

Another signature _(light blue holocrons like a thirst for knowledge, dark blue waters with a fruitful pink, nonhuman and all the more interesting for it)_ congratulated the first with a dignified whoop. Gladly chanting sweet _sweet_ victory the squid-like quarren clapped Ben's rival in the back.

"Please, Hennix, not so loud; you might just shatter Solo's fragile ego."

"Think the job's already done there, V."

_Throw confetti, won't you two…_

Tuning out the _humble celebration,_ Ben took the loss in stride, determined to remain defeated on the mossy ground for the rest of eternity to never rise again.

"Mind if I give you a hand?"

At least until a third signature gently completed the fray. Blue eyes shining with kindness _(clay beige home to a calming blue, red warm safe fire and something like what **love** is)_ and a bit of mischief, a monk-like student offered assistance.

"Sure thing, Tai."

So, smiling dizzily despite everything as he took hold of another saber's handle—effectively rescuing his enemy's wooden blade from the dirt—Ben Solo accepted help from a dear friend. Getting up to fight another day.

_( ~~And **win** , but not the way he might've wanted to. ~~)_

Inside the temple, oddly reminiscent of a different place and another time, a long delayed message arrived. Its arrival sent a signal, and from inside the robe of a proud Jedi Master watching his students be exceptionally grown up kids, a small apparatus pinged.

It lit up, red light visible through the beige cloth of a shirt's front pocket, and then in most overkill fashion it started to beep. Everything else stopped, everyone present knew what it meant.

"A message!" Eagerly pumping a fist in the air, Ben was the one to say it. "It's been so long—do you think it's mom's or dad's, Uncle Luke?"

It was his mother's, predictably enough, so he was immediately allowed to watch. It brought no greetings. It brought no good news.

And if you had asked Ben Solo who his grandfather was by the end of it, he might not have known what to tell you.

* * *

**… … …** Western Reaches of the Inner Rim - Jakku, 01:30 PM Standard Time. 29 ABY, Nearing The End Of The Search / About Two Months Before The Day Kylo Ren Officially Met Armitage Hux **… … …**

* * *

Rey had never cared much for physical contact, even when she'd been very small. Her father was naturally affectionate and so found it unusual and hurtful at times, it made him worry perhaps there was something wrong with him that might've been passed down. Her mother had been far more understanding on this front: _She'll grow out of it_ —the wife of the Solana family said, knitting together a dress for a doll when she thought Rey wouldn't see; holding her husband close, so strongly wanting to be happy— _And even if she doesn't you'll always know she loves us still._

_(Rey never **did** grow out of it. Jakku wasn't a nurturing place. Not if you were alone.)_

The Captain didn't like physical contact either, that Rey knew of. But when she came out of their sleek ship that matched the armour she wasn't wearing in colour, short pixie-like blonde hair already a victim of the sand that the wind carried along as she walked up to Rey's tipped AT-AT for the final time because all her things save for the black bed sheets that the Captain had draped over one arm had been offloaded then put inside, got down on one knee letting well-loved insulated fabric the colour of empty space drag on the ground and opened both arms wide displaying what were she anyone else might be called caution—Rey didn't hesitate. She ran.

She might've been holding on a little too tight. The Captain didn't chastise her for it.

"I'll miss you."

"Me too, little scavenger." The Captain's voice had been toneless to her, at first, but as time passed Rey had learned to detect the rare warmth occasionally leaking through. "Take care, alright? Remember I'm just a message away. There'll be rations reserved for you always if you ask for them. Anyone gives you grief you point them to me and I'll— _straighten them out_ for you."

Rey couldn't help a grin. It was a smug, slow, _learned_ thing.

"I'll make certain to tell everyone that."

She wouldn't, of course. _Couldn't,_ might be the more appropriate word. But it was still a nice thought and she clung to it.

Time had passed since they first started; no reliable leads on any front. They'd come a long way from when the Captain dwarfed her and their only halfway reliable means of knowing where to go was throwing a light blue knife at the map praying it landed somewhere habitable and saying _‘There’,_ but progress also meant their time was almost up. Like the monster they sought out was the rocks on the shore, and they were simply going to crash against him and _break._ And they were adamant she'd still be safer _staying here._

Not with them. She knew. She knew but still a part of her had hoped. Had thought perhaps now so much had changed and she'd discovered for certain _that there was no one coming back for her_ —

Not to say that the Captain _didn't_ still dwarf her, but at least she'd had a growth spurt since and now she was almost as tall as—

She took note of the missing link to their odd circumstantial chain. Struggled not to be hurt by the absence.

"Where…?"

"Don't take it badly Rey." The Captain separated slightly, put a hand on her shoulder, squeezed. She wasn't smiling, practically never smiled, but there was something gentle there. "It's not you, it's just. Hux— _the General,_ he is remarkably bad at this."

"Saying goodbye?"

"Leaving people behind. Even and especially if it's necessary."

The way she said the title, as if reminding herself of something, forcibly re-accustoming herself to an ugly vice that she thought she had long dropped for good…

Rey still wanted to go with them.

"You'll be alright?"

"I'm not the one you should be worrying about."

Her hand gripped the back of the Captain's beige leather jacket a little harder. The Captain took it in stride. Reciprocated.

Rey suddenly thought about the light blue stone, so long ago. It occurred to her how she had never gotten to repair it fully. There would always be scars.

…Too long after it was appropriate, the Captain was the first to let go. Rey rubbed her eyes and told herself that at least this time she wouldn't be alone when they left.

"Let's go inside, Rey. We have time, but setting up your bed in there will take a while and I'd rather we not be cooking alive outside first. Has our droid friend settled down well?"

* * *

**… … …** What Was Once Ilum - Starkiller Base Planning Site, 07:10 AM Standard Time. 29 ABY, About A Year After Ben Solo's Fall To The Dark Side / About A Month After The Day Kylo Ren Officially Met Armitage Hux **… … …**

* * *

There was a certain quality to the outer layer of the Base, to Ilum itself. A Light that might've been welcoming once, if no less wild or mercilessly objective than any other world for it.

The trees, green like the jungle of a planet that Ben Solo had long left behind as his old life burned—well, many said distance made the heart fond, and Kylo was prepared to chime in with the fact that isolation certainly made it less picky. In the appropriate weather, they might've been nice.

There was nothing salvageable about its insides however. It was almost too easy to lose your sense of place and wind up somewhere untamed and unpleasant, the shrieking of giant bats made for lost sleep and very soon construction work would be at and all time high, making it all the worse. Disorienting tridimensional _twisted_ thing that they were, Kylo felt entirely entitled to hate them. He'd hardly blame anyone else for it, either, and besides Hux those who did were certainly many and steadily growing in number.

There was an eerie quality to the place that put everyone off, troopers and junior officers and people from High Command alike. The Force was darker here as it was in places were certain tragedies had occurred and sacred things were lost; almost as dark in shade as Coruscant. Kylo himself had not been affected as strongly by it, or at least hadn't noticed that he had until that one faithful encounter a while back when he had to watch the General revive traumatic memories that for the first time in his life Kylo had no context for.

Kylo was no stranger to trauma, he had seen into the heads and hearts of others, into the recesses of what either side would resort to to win. He had seen the horrors of war from both flanks, learned to ease them, but it was somehow worse to _not know._ To not be _able_ to.

He had developed a way to make himself less uncomfortable since then, less adverse to the after affects. All things considered he felt entirely entitled to share that trick of his by ways of ripples in the Force. A certain energy in the air so that, as long as he remained inside it, the Base would appear just a tad more hospitable than what it truly was.

He'd only managed to extend it to a few rooms at first, and then a few kilometers with practice. It was far from the whole Base and it infuriated him that with how little it cost him to maintain the small, unobtrusively subtle suggestion it should've been theoretically possible to extend it more—but it was _something_ and people like that man recently demoted to Lieutenant near engineering and that new Ensign whose name he hadn't cared enough to memorize and that other Captain in red who'd come to visit today were all feeling better because of it, to name a few. Not to mention the sheer number of cadets it was affecting for the better too, even if soon they'd all be moved to Captain Phasma's Finalizer again.

It'd also had the side effect of making Ben feel good about himself, which had greatly disturbed Kylo at first before he assured himself it definitely hadn't been a gesture of good will: merely one of practicality, a way to test out the extent of his own skill and power. Besides, the better everyone felt the faster the Base was finished, the faster he could be out of here to never come back and that was the only reason he had bothered with it. With a nod of approval to this rationalization, he had slept less badly that one night. Slept a bit less badly since.

Now it was morning, quite a bit since then, and moving through the closed off corridors and too-open walkways was a little less oppressive and vertigo inducing respectively. Felt a little less _wrong_ overall.

Strangely enough, actively maintaining the mental suggestion had the side effect of making people less afraid of _him_ as an extension of it as well. Though no less willing to avoid him, they no longer recoiled when he passed them by. No longer fled the premises promptly if he remained for longer than a minute as if they could feel the clinging tendrils of the Dark side covering his very form.

It didn't make them get out of his way any faster—but he wasn't complaining about it. He'd have no leg to stand on when he criticized the Imperials he'd been assigned to work with thus far for their treatment of himself and others if he let this get to him and started mentally complaining to himself about it. Droning on and on and boring the resident mind reader to madness until he attacked the nearest wall just to have something to do.

And they were right to flee from him. Hatred and anger, pain and fear were just one thing—but what the **_Dark_** truly was? It was _passion,_ strong emotion in need of an outlet. It was a fixed point that wouldn't stop shifting, the savage warping of one's very own feelings. It was the very definition of chaotic instability.

He knew it wasn't a lack of respect that made everyone act that way when he was around. They respected Hux plenty, even if most interactions they had with him had been laced with a different kind of fear; one Ben associated with late nights copying faded letters from an alphabet long obsolete because disappointing Uncle Luke wasn't an option.

He wondered if he'd start feeling that way after a while, himself, from sheer exposure to it.

_(These people were Ben's own now, too. He'd lived among them, ate among them, mourned among them. Maybe he **should** start acting like it.)_

Speaking of Hux, Kylo had been transversing the insides of the Base for far longer than he was strictly comfortable with in pursuit of the man. Checking the usual meeting rooms—barging in on the occupied ones—and in the engineering rooms and of course near the section of the hollow opening in the planet like a saber's entry point from the other day that would someday become the oscillator chamber. Checking every spot that offered a view of the outside world beyond when all else failed.

He had found nothing thus far. When usually where there was formality and respect and overly complicated mathematics Hux ought to be nearby.

It was palpably starting to worry him until he sensed something like that familiar barrier.

It was coming from outside.

He raised himself to his full height, overly conscious of the many layers of his black robes and how on occasion they could serve as protection. Didn't bother with Command codes he knew he wouldn't memorize when he was given them and just pried open the door using the Force.

The wind was whistling. The cold air _hit him right in the face_ even through the mask somehow and once he'd put a hand to its forehead and opened his eyes anew the white of snow beyond made him regret not taking the time to try and recall those codes. Made him want to go back inside and never leave again because in hindsight the unnatural quasi-metallic insides of the Base were _far_ preferable to anything he might find out here.

But the unmistakable signature was still there, flickering: a candle's flame.

A candle's flame in the middle of a blizzard.

So he steeled himself and stepped into the snow.

He hadn't cared to go this far near it before. In fact he'd landed at one of very few landing pads no matter how remote their location when he'd first arrived here precisely to avoid it. They were made of metal. They were safely concealed inside. They were always free of snow.

It didn't— _hurt._ Though he didn't know why part of him had thought it might. It was more the phantom of sensation that had him shivering than the cold. He'd taken the time to cover himself in the warmth of the Light but then the far more preferable Dark had come because for some reason it'd burned to try that, here.

Luke had always said that, when the Light burned…

Kylo _shouldn't_ be recalling that. Not right now. Not ever really.

He hadn't set a foot on snow since the day he'd made that lost lightsaber.

He was a Knight of Ren now, not an aspiring Jedi Knight. No gentle Luke to guide him, no encouraging students behind him, no tauntaun plushy for him to hide beneath and no Han Solo to come save him from the nightmares caused perhaps by stories that he'd heard about his Uncle's youth.

He took a step forward, took that final step away from a meager notion of safety and into the bleached panoramic view beyond stretching into a horizon that _did_ exist even if Kylo couldn't see it. The door closed silently behind him yet he could swear he heard it drawing shut among the stillness but he didn't tense, he just kept walking, stayed near the wall of the Base at all times as it fluctuated unnaturally between stone and steel. He almost found a comfort in its unpredictability.

He hated snow.

He put a hand to the porosities of its surface, when merely trailing along it wouldn't be enough. It soon turned to smooth durasteel, went back again to rock. It wasn't enough either.

_He hated snow._

Maybe if he closed his eyes and let that fiery signature be all he saw he'd be alright?

_He hated **snow.**_ Oh how he loathed it.

_(If he was angry at it, it couldn't hurt him. If he stayed angry at it, it wouldn't…)_

_There._ There, there was Hux. _Finally_. This entire trek was starting to get boring.

He opened his eyes in the midst of his relief to a spectacle of snow falling fast: the frenzy of a furious hail, the implacability of nature at its finest. Had half a mind to blink at what he saw.

The General was _sitting in the snow._ Back prone against a metallic section of the wall of the main Base as it got lost in the white storm above them. By all means looking as if he'd fallen asleep there, or perhaps something far more sinister, black greatcoat drawn over his shoulders _for some bizarre reason_ leaving him even more exposed to the elements in a light gray undershirt than he'd have been with it properly on.

And Kylo's pace sped up considerably but the signature was still there and visible puffs of air assured him Hux was still breathing and _what was he doing here of all places when he himself had been the one to say the cold could kill_ —

Kylo risked putting the anger to rest momentarily because it was proving to be the opposite of helpful. That just left him with concern as blinding as the weather.

"General."

No response. Kylo risked crouching, trying to rouse him.

"General!"

"Leave me be…"

It had been a garbled phrase, voice far more sleepy than anything else. That wasn't a comfort.

"General?!"

"Too warm… Leave."

"Hux!"

The redhead had yet to open his eyes. If anything he'd pushed the back of his head a little more against the wall, then his cheek against Kylo's hand when it proved to be available by means of getting close enough.

Even through the glove there was an alarming lack of warmth.

"Hux, are you trying to kill yourself?! _Or me!?"_

"Don't care. What do you _want_ now…?"

"Answer the question!"

"It's too hot inside. Enclosed and awful. Leave me alone."

The wind flung crystalline snowflakes wildly around them. The blizzard was still raging. He'd like to think it wasn't when Hux decided it'd be a good idea to go out and _stay there_ but he had no way to be certain.

He shook his head, less firmly than he would've liked to. Eyes shut, Hux didn't see it.

"Not any time soon, no."

"I'll get up eventually."

"By yourself. Sure, you will."

"Don't get sarcastic with me, Ren; just how old are you under that thing."

"I'm here to stay, you will not drive me off!"

"I have driven off far better people."

Through the mask his distress would've gotten downplayed by a lot if it weren't for the constant crackling sound its vocoder made with every frantic breath. He'd heard recording of what Vader sounded like, this wasn't all that off the mark. His hand had been half-heartedly batted away. Being this close to the ground was doing nothing for Kylo's willingness to remain here, and if this was how Hux wanted to die—

_You know what? No._

No, he wasn't backing down.

He'd _cause_ fear; he wasn't going _to be afraid._

He sat on the ground right next to the General, slowly as if it might open up and swallow him whole.

"I hate you."

"It's mutual. Glad we could clear that up, Ren."

Their shoulders connected, Ben expanded the environmental shield that he'd been mentally projecting around himself; bending the Force so it would surround them like a blanket. It was harder to concentrate on it than it should've been but he didn't need any more motivation.

"I hate you _so much_ right now."

"No need to say it so strongly. Some people might just get the wrong idea."

He tried again. The Light didn't burn. Ben didn't find that any more reassuring.

"I swear I'd carry you if I didn't think you'd simply shoot me in the back for trying."

"You know me so well, already."

No words were spoken for a good long while. The snow didn't hurt, but that was a matter of time only and its temperature made it remarkably cool underneath him _and it was messing with his sense of time somehow._

The snow didn't hurt. The skin of his side went aflame with pins and needles however and he quickly leaned back towards the Dark again, hunching over painfully against the wall behind them.

"…I hate this."

"You can come closer, if it'll help."

His face wasn't uncovered but it wouldn't stop prickling.

"…It would."

"So move, Ren."

"I'd like—I do need to be close."

Kylo shouldn't be surprised. Hux had experience with these things, he'd recognize the warning signs.

"…It's fine if you _do_ leave. Nobody would blame you. You didn't have to come get me, in the first place."

Hux observed him carefully through half lidded eyes. Dull gray-green as always. Sharpened by something analytical but sympathetic he neither wanted to nor cared to decipher at the moment.

Hux knew how this kind of feelings got to you and _clung and didn't let up,_ had come here precisely to seek an escape from something like it, so Kylo moved just a bit more to the right until their sides were almost pressed together.

"Who else would have done it, if I hadn't?"

When normally it would get him yelled at, the irreverent inquiry earned him a mere shoulder twitch.

"Phasma, most likely. Cardinal not too far behind; he's stopping by today. Perhaps Rivas, though I find it doubtful. Naturally anyone who had seen me exit the Base through the security feed eventually."

Kylo had yet to know who any of the people on that list was but for the chrome-clad Captain, whose mask was plastered in any propaganda poster that the redhead hadn't plastered his own face to and even some of them that the General _had._

He also hadn't made it a point to memorize any other names yet, so it could be a grand multitude of important people for all _he_ knew.

The General's answer had been swift and devoid of doubt. He wondered if he'd even have one to give, had anyone bothered to ask.

"Well no one else is here. So there."

They didn't talk after that challenging remark on his part. The silence lasted even longer than before. The ginger didn't hesitate to hide his face against Kylo's shoulder, mostly still half asleep, or so Ben chose think. Ben took the liberty of putting an arm around the redhead's neck, leaving them closer still, and when no sudden reaction came happened to leave it there.

The trees _were_ nice, if he kept his eyes confined to them instead of the ground. If he ignored the fact that the green was faded instead of vibrant and the very atmosphere around them freezing.

He hated snow. So very much. He hated the very ground they were both resting over, he hoped it would be vaporized. Expunged. The day the Base was ready to fire.

At least he had his mask on. A big one, far as small mercies went.

The crackling signature next to his own went still, quieting from an unstable comm signal to faint static. Kylo almost thought the worse before becoming aware again of the surrounding tundra and noticing that the redhead had merely managed to fall back asleep against his side. Pass out again, rather.

He briefly considered the possibility of looking into the man's dreams. Thought about testing his luck on trying to decode them. The occasionally understandable static of the gray surface waters was certainly easier to accustom to than the red raging fire beyond, perhaps now that his mind was unguarded Hux would think more like a human being and Kylo would be able to read him better?

After a heartbeat's hesitation, he put his hand to the man's forehead. Did what Luke did for him, what Ben did for his fellow Jedi students so that they would rest well with a dreamless sleep—and considering everything he simply hoped that it would work.

The overly fast rhythm to Hux's mind settled down after a beat. The man mumbled something imperceptible against Kylo's neck that sounded suspiciously similar to: _It's alright._

It tickled.

They would both be very sore after this.

…He might hate this—a little less now.

He leaned slightly closer and settled down to wait out the blizzard too, concentrating completely on the living essence next to his; like sitting next to a river's wild waters with a warm campfire waiting out the rain, if he ignored the subdued violet glow to its glass-like appearance and the fact that rain would never cease. Stayed unmoving until the feeling to his limbs had gone and he felt a faint hint of movement at his side.

Hux seemed not to fully register his presence at first.

"Ren are you trying to choke me?"

"Finally! Are you ready to get up now?"

Or perhaps he had, and merely perceived enough not to deem Ben a real threat.

"What are you—I thought I'd _dreamed_ you—you should've left, I would've been fine!"

"In the middle of a blizzard. In an ice planet you yourself confirmed can freeze people to death."

"Whether you believe it or not, it's a fact that _I would've been fine."_

Ben didn't argue the point. Hux probably lacked the energy to. Neither of them bothered to seek some distance from the other just then: Kylo chose not to stand, the General chose not to push him away.

"…Why didn't you move me?"

"What?"

"You Force wizards can put people to sleep, can't you? Make then remain so, at the very least. Would've made it hard to rouse me. Why didn't you move me?"

 _How did you know that?_ Ben wanted to ask, but didn't.

Half a shrug and a too-sincere answer leaked through anyway before Kylo could stop them.

"I thought you wouldn't want me to, and it doesn't work that way. The risk was always there, I didn't want to wake you."

Hux separated a bit, blinked tired bright green eyes at him in stunned confusion. Greener than the greenery around them, by immediate comparison alone. Closer too.

"You didn't want to—why do you _care?"_

_Do I know you?_

"Does it matter? Why wouldn't I?"

"I haven't precisely been civil to you thus far, Ren."

Another shrug, much more purposeful. Only of the shoulder that Hux wasn't presently leaning against.

"Neither have I. And it'd be disorienting, you might've attacked me. I'm going to work with you; I need you alive for that."

"Ah…" Hux sagged weightless against him anew like someone told him the world made sense again. "True."

"Besides, I _want_ you alive. We _Force wizards,"_ he made sure to emphasize just what he thought of the derogatory term. "Are a _force_ to be reckoned with all our own, when we decide we want something."

Hux let out something like the caught off-guard beginnings of a snicker at the very intentional pun, flung a hand over his mouth as if to hide it. The hints of a grin peeked over it for a couple seconds.

"That—was awful. Seriously, how old _are you_ under that thing?"

Ben pressed his side to Hux's slightly more so he could get more comfortable. It was more of a nudge, made their thighs brush together. Hux elbowed him. It felt a bit like a soft shove; didn't accomplish anything when it came to increasing the already established lacking distance.

"What do you have against the mask anyway, Hux?"

"It's disturbing, for one. For two I don't like masks. Never have. Before you ask: no idea why."

"I haven't asked."

"Many have, I'd rather get it out of the way quickly."

Hux had moved to rest his head against the durasteel plate behind them, against Kylo's arm instead of Kylo's shoulder or neck, watching the blizzard rage on as they remained untouched.

Kylo tried futilely to decipher what went through his head but it was just more static.

"Why the sudden fixation with my age."

"You express opinions and ideas and ideals so childish. Arguments that I've heard children make. Sometimes I wonder, is all."

"Did you just make a joke at my expense?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

But he was grinning that slightly gentler grin that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't pulling away yet, so Ben took that as a win.

Experimentally, Kylo tightened his arm around Hux's neck, just enough to constrict slightly.

_"Are_ you trying to choke me?"

"Do you _want_ me to try?"

"…That is a very curious thing to ask."

Ben need not be a mind reader to hear the implied _Weirdo_ at the end of that deliberately neutral sentence; which was a good thing, because the static showed no sign of letting up. Beneath the mask, his face warmed uncomfortably all the same.

It was almost peaceful, that oddly familiar signature. Like a shoreline instead of a cliff's edge. If he could picture it in his mind then the snow wasn't as much of a problem.

"I don't know, you sometimes act like it."

"I should hope that isn't a threat."

"You could always just say it, _is all."_

"And you'd be _willing_ —do you even hear yourself speak sometimes?!"

_"Do_ you want me to? You've been avoiding directly answering the question thus far." _And will continue to, by the look of things_.

Hux sighed. Standing up. "This isn't a conversation that we should be having."

_Still neglecting to give me a definitive answer_.

Ben might've teased the man some more for that to mask the obviously looming distress. As it was, Kylo's legs had gone numb. Collecting his bearing, the General seemed only slightly less put together than always. He envied how Hux could make that look so easy even keeping to the wall for support. _(For a moment, the skies flashed fire, he blinked and it was gone.)_

Begrudgingly, the Knight of Ren took the offered helping hand and deliberately didn't think about the patch of melting snow underneath them both. He opened his eyes. The blizzard had abated somewhat while they talked but that didn't change much about the immediate landscape around them. Everything was wet and cold and horrible again.

He shivered. It wasn't due to the cold; the Light was oddly warm around him. Hux sighed again, sneaked an arm around his waist and pulled him—if that was even possible—a bit closer.

Kylo firmly told himself that _that_ was just due to the cold.

Hux started walking to the right, in the opposite direction Kylo had come from. Kylo had half a mind to correct their course but now that the snow didn't restrict his vision quite as much even with the mask on he could see there actually _was_ a door in that direction. Deceivingly close. Certainly closer than the one he himself had come through.

Perhaps Hux would have actually been fine on his own, had never been in any real danger, but Kylo would never know that. Part of him was glad for it.

_(Even knowing this, Ben might still have stayed. It was supposed to be a private process and yet three other students chose to stay with him when he himself was chosen by his original kyber crystal. Sat down by the exit's edge while he remained safe further inside and simply watched it snow, talking among themselves in a warm hush, making an active effort to include him even if he was too enthralled at the time making that first blue lightsaber to care.)_

_(He wondered what had happened to the section of the caves they'd all stayed at. He'd never recognize it, as the Base stood now.)_

_(He never got to tell them how much that gesture meant to him. **Never would**. Couldn't help but mourn that once again.)_

"…I don't think I _want_ you to choke me, per se. It's just rather easy to get you to that point."

"Huh?"

"Get you to get angry, I mean—at me most of all. Get you not to think. I guessed if you were taking it out on me you weren't destroying anything else."

Ben could not begin to put into words just how unhealthy and messed up that point of view was. Kylo didn't care enough to; he just wanted them _both_ to be out of the snow.

"With how you reacted to my doubting its effectiveness, I had rather gathered if I destroyed anything around here you'd have me killed in my sleep." He casually pointed out.

"You're not exactly wrong. Though I wouldn't have gone that far, I _am_ in charge of everything including your own meals; continued food poisoning works wonders for someone's willingness to obey."

That had sounded like a joke, if a remarkably macabre one.

Ben fervently hoped it was a joke. Didn't really want to find out if it wasn't.

"That doesn't sound like a tactic you would employ."

"Not me, no, not in these circumstances; but I have seen it used to great effect."

"By?"

"Someone who is dead—I just realized, I've no idea what you look like under there. You could be younger or older or another species entirely. Somebody who thinks that things like these are normal, that hacking away at something in the bridge is an appropriate response to having a bad day."

Kylo did not protest the abrupt change in subject, mildly insulting as it might've been.

"You read my file?"

"I'm going to work with you: I have read _everything._ Everything I could find, including performance reviews. Most found it a bit too easy to get a rise out of you."

"You're not _that_ hard to get a rise out of either, General."

Not that Kylo hadn't _actively been trying to_ for a while now. He wondered if, without realizing it and practically at the same time, they'd both been trying to get the other to get furious enough to be the one willing to lash out first.

It put things into perspective. Would certainly explain some interactions.

Getting Hux to grin at him had felt far better though, on the few occasions he had managed it. He didn't see the cheeky smirk from earlier, but he had heard it, and an amused huff was better than nothing.

One of these days, he was going to get a _real smile_ out of the man, he was determined and getting closer.

"I have been told I am slightly more irritable when I'm tired."

A new door opened before them. Hux continued the conversation oblivious to Kylo's reaffirmed life goal.

"More liable to compromise too. Although I'm afraid I just don't see it."

Kylo, _pointedly,_ did not see it either. He didn't testify to that accord though. Just took a step into the quasi-metallic cavernous insides of the Base—the still unpleasantly cold but blessedly _snow-free_ cavernous insides—barely managing to stop himself from deflating in relief.

Hux rolled his eyes ceiling-ward as if praying for strength from some deity he didn't believe in, pressing Kylo's side against his a little more fully as they walked all the same.

* * *

**… … …** What Was Once Ilum - Starkiller Base Planning Site, 09:10 AM Standard Time. 29 ABY, About A Year After Ben Solo's Fall To The Dark Side / About A Month After The Day Kylo Ren Officially Met Armitage Hux **… … …**

* * *

Ensign Dopheld Mitaka had been assigned to what local personnel had jokingly started referring to as ‘camera duty’ for the third time in his life since clearing the Academy, and he was having a normal day. _Was,_ being the keyword here.

There was Lieutenant née Captain Rivas talking earnestly through a long distance comm with someone Mitaka thought might be vaguely named something like ‘Hassle’ or ‘Hazel’ before Mitaka turned off the monitor to give that conversation some privacy—which he didn't think was _too_ illegal so long as he made sure to review the footage promptly—there was also the usual activity in the corridors on the part of people hurrying somewhere or another from door to door and cleaning crews together with the usual patrol of security detail and also the crates containing the parts for the Base that had been made in Arkanisian refineries and offloaded in Engineering for further inspection as always.

He stared at one particular door towards the untamed planet beyond the main body of the Base for a moment too long, wondering for the umpteenth time if he should call Captain Phasma or someone else or do something himself, because the General had yet to return and the feed from outside had been clouded by the snow storm since the necessary parts for the theoretical weather stabilizing system the General proposed had yet to arrive—when that door opened, letting in a bit of the blizzard beyond.

And Lord Ren came through it. With the General in tow.

They were exceptionally close too, Lord Ren keeping an arm draped over the General's shoulders and the General one around the other's waist. They were talking, but no one was shouting yet. They were heading for the medical bay, which Mitaka guessed was _the least unusual thing about this,_ because truthfully they both had been outside for far too long and that couldn't have had a good effect on either of their health. The General appeared to be protesting their current course all the same. The heavily intimidating Master of the Knights of Ren, in a fit of bravery or stupidity, was steadily ignoring this while well within shooting distance.

Slowly, Ensign Mitaka reached for the console, and turned off that monitor too.

He took a black mug from the desk, but his provision of caf had long run out.

He was ready to walk away. He'd review all the footage later—

The loose lid of the topmost crate moved.

The crate with the parts, the one from Engineering, _it moved._

And then it trembled as a ginger kitten peeked a tiny feline head outward before coming out of it, and Mitaka's heart stopped taking residence in his throat. He turned off that monitor too. Fiddled with his hat for a moment too long.

Surrounded by an increased number of blank screens than what he'd started with this shift, Dopheld turned around and made the trek to the Engineering Department. Once there, he scooped up what he _guessed_ to be an Arkanisian breed of tooka cub from the ground.

She was so small that he could effortlessly cup her in his hands. Her tail brushed his wrist as she fought against his hold. She was _soft,_ too soft for a normal tooka because all of her was covered in fur, but her claws were sharp clinging tools and his gloves would never be the same again. She was meowing at him as if asking where her mama went, staring up at him with scared and pleading baby blue eyes.

A very nervous Ensign Mitaka helplessly stared back at his new find of the day, and as always when in doubt started walking to go ask the General what to do. Onward towards the medical bay, to face whatever uncomfortable conversation might be awaiting him there.

He hoped he wouldn't be asked to write the routine mandatory report just yet. He hoped he wouldn't be asked to get rid of the cat. She was really, _really_ soft, and though her teeth weren't sharp enough to pierce the glove handling her was getting distracting.

She'd given up the fight, seeming to realize he wouldn't hurt her; had settled down into a ball to rest more comfortably between his hands, head hidden by her furry front paws. She was now purring.

It was exceptionally calming, all things considered. He started petting her beneath one fuzzy pointed ear with his thumb.

* * *

**… … …** Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer Finalizer, 10:01 AM Standard Time. 29 ABY, About A Year And A Half After Ben Solo's Fall To The Dark Side / About Three Months After The Day Kylo Ren Officially Met Armitage Hux **… … …**

* * *

The Finalizer's tangled passageways and rooms failed to cram together at angles Kylo could see himself getting used to. Even with the Force to guide the way he couldn't possibly have kept up with the giant maze that were the twists and turns of the massive Star Destroyer's insides.

Long hallways ended and intersected, and turbolifts up and down made it impossible for him to recall their route. He expected straight halls where he found deviations, and corridors where he just passed from one room to another. Compared from previous experiences and so assumed _designation,_ met instead with a ship whose every nook and cranny was important to the overall whole and utilized in some way—yet very few so vital on their own that their absence would be missed. A ship whose elaborate functions were completely synchronized within themselves: co-dependent and integrated and _efficient._ Different in that key aspect from many other Star Destroyers he'd happened to stay at before winding up here.

After persistently being prompted numerous times, the General had at last painstakingly explained to him a fact that had served to confuse and intrigue him from the very start: that the Resurgent-Class had spent the years in constant evolution since its creation, the oldest of the bunch being reworked every couple of years ‘like vultures fed on carryon’ so that every new installment brought a technological edge of betterment to the overall model. Emphasizing how the unique drastic differences in layout from one to another—necessitating personalized blueprints—could serve to hopelessly disorient enemies and allies alike, and sometimes even the occasional transferring officer.

Something their ship as the newest reworked installment had depressingly in common with the rest of its kin though, was that there was very little communal space. Or rather, almost every space seemed communal but he could tell from a second, far more informed glace how practically none of it was.

The Falcon had been spacious, but never such in a single room. Even space itself seemed to bend and twist for the benefit of that one ship but there was only so much it could stretch, which meant that when his fa—when _Han Solo and his friends_ sat down together for a bite to eat, it was sometimes with cramped awkward proximity and not a little light shoving and grumbling. But at least there had been _fun,_ there. Companionship and banter and real camaraderie.

In the Order what passed for camaraderie was the cold professionalism that resulted from people being raised by the thousands into their profession, of the thousands who enlisted later in life and grew near indistinguishable from the first given enough time. The shared acknowledgement that what they all ultimately desired, independent of the methods it took to achieve, would be worth it in the end; the better outcome not just for them but for everyone else as well. Kinship taken from numbers. People unified beneath a single cause, a single banner, who had all been promised something as abstract as the eventual betterment of the universe.

All the same, just because it seemed artificial in comparison, that didn't mean it was any less valid a sentiment. No matter how much a part of him _that should be dead_ told him they had somehow been convinced to go at their goal through all the wrong methods known to humankind.

 _ ~~The Empire failed for a reason,~~_ Ben caught himself thinking once, and Kylo retroactively erased that thought.

Star Destroyers were nothing like a Corellian freighter the same way the Finalizer was nothing like a smuggler's ship. Nothing like any ship he'd ever known. Yet even starships like this one still held hope; saw human nature flourishing at its finest.

The Order was much the same way. A fitting metaphor, now he thought about it.

 _The Empire failed for a reason,_ Kylo thought then, wandering the empty corridors of the silent ship like a haunting wraith.

Hux was the only Commander he'd met who ever let his officers take on a relatively light shift at all, if only when he was absolutely certain there was no potential danger nearby.

True, the Empire failed for a reason. And maybe it was for the reasons that Uncle Luke and Ben's parents claimed, or maybe it was just so that the Order could exist. All the same—

He was still glad that it had.

…Kylo found Hux at the stylized observation deck at the leftmost side of their ship where through the windows faraway star systems and distant nebulae glistened, watching the prismatic shades journeying slowly in their vessel's wake.

Gaze methodically following the distant dots of light outside, Hux was expressionless. Kylo had often seen him pausing imperceptibly at the windows before, during these long few months orbiting the Base when the ship had remained almost separate from time, but this was different.

Kylo imagined the man would be watching the Base— _watching Ilum_ —since during their conversations he always sounded rather proud and protective of the place. Many times it had been so, but the General also appeared rather content to simply marvel at the infinite scenery instead.

Kylo entered the massive observation deck, another unusual if necessary characteristic many other Destroyers lacked and one among others he suspected his own Co-Commander might've pushed for, coming to a stop just within arm's reach of Hux.

As usual, it was deserted but for the two of them; and the equally massive viewing ports build into the far wall, strategically separated into triangles of clear transparisteel interconnected themselves by darkened durasteel inlaid at the edges, held the best any window in the ship but its rightmost twin had to offer. On the outside however, the opaque outer shell of the glass was impossible to distinguish from the metal of the ship in both appearance and durability.

Even Kylo's muffled footsteps echoed faintly in the all-consuming quiet of the room. Head tilting sideways in slight acknowledgement, the redheaded man watched the stationary stars as they tinged the whole space blue. Not even daring to dignify his presence with a nod or a greeting.

Personally, Kylo thought Hux ought to be rather unaffected by the view, probably having spend far too much time within this class of vehicle.

Although ‘the masterful way the windows were crafted’ and ‘their elegant as well as structurally practical arrangement’ were both impressive features—that Hux had once seemingly lost himself describing the intricacies of when the Knight of Ren had first stumbled upon him here while Ben simply watched him whilst making the right noises to vaguely indicate attention—Kylo himself knew the way it felt and the way space could look. It was nothing new, nothing unusual, to him.

And neither was it new for Hux, so he could not for the life of him understand what drew the redhead so strongly towards _space._ What made his eyes shine each time they'd settle on a particular dot in the distance, an undecipherable string of calculations running within his mind until even the numbers became impossible to discern.

Perhaps it was enviable, to never lose that wonder in regards to the unknown. Never lose that interested gleam in his eyes.

_(Ben had learned to live for that gleam, the few times it'd been directed at him. Which Kylo understood was pretty stupid of him but he had no control over.)_

He fiddled with the couple of ration bars he'd brought with him. Thoughts lingering on how to start the conversation.

Their dynamic was still tense and new, but during moments like these it was most of all comfortable. There was no need to overanalyze it. Hux, Kylo realized early on, was more a man that said everything he wouldn't shout with a subtle flair.

Breaking the easy silences that settled between them during these scarce instances of peace felt wrong. Glance glued to the stars, Hux rarely seemed unhappy, and chance occasions as they were those few occasions… _weren't bad._

Yet, while Hux wasn't exactly an open book when it came to his past—when it came to anything really—his present was easy enough. And one thing Kylo had noticed was that when Hux was stressed or upset, he didn't eat.

It wasn't that he _deliberately_ deprived himself; of that much, Kylo had been sure. It was more like he just— _forgot_ that food was a necessity or even an option to begin with, and the longer he went without food, the further his mood worsened. When he finally remembered to and then _decided to_ eat again, it was like someone flipped a switch: instant attitude adjustment.

After a while of watching the stars too and trying unsuccessfully to decipher whatever deeper meaning was to be found in them, he settled for the most basic of greetings:

"Hux."

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and struggled to hide a smirk. Then abruptly remember he didn't need to.

Kylo thanked the Force for his mask, since with it protecting him from scrutiny he could let his triumphant grin shine on unabashed and unabated when he saw Hux stiffen ever so slightly. As if just now becoming consciously aware of Kylo's continued presence in the premises because the Knight of Ren had actively called attention to himself.

"…Ren."

The smirk faded just as quickly though, because Hux did not exactly look _happy_ to see him.

To be fair, Hux had _never_ looked happy to see him. Had never looked happy about anything for as long as Kylo had known him, as sad as that may sound. The closest he'd come was the semi-genuine reaction to an unexpected joke and feeling satisfied at the sight of a job well done.

_(Oftentimes, New Republican upbringing shining through, Ben had half a mind to shake some sense into him and tell him he had the **right** to be happy. That **everyone** had the right to be happy. Yet Ben also had an inkling that Hux was prone to overthinking everything, because that's just who he is; and Kylo knew better than most that if you start to dissect happiness, it's bound to dissipate.)_

…Truthfully, in Hux's defense the redhead never _looked_ like much of anything. Not unless they were more or less alone and even then only when a reaction had been startled out of him.

As it happened, Kylo had made it a habit of that much. Made it his mission in life to startle anything and everything out of the redhead for sport: smiles, surprise, bewildered expressions… you name it. Anything that wasn't a sneer or a scoff was fair game, even if it got him yelled at.

_(He'd only gotten the absolute **tiniest** hints of a grin from Hux so far though, and Force forbid nothing so overt as a **genuine smile** , but mark his words he'd get there eventually.)_

Still, let it be said the record showed that when the General next spoke Hux's non-expression did not precisely look happy.

"What are you doing here?"

When he'd announced his presence, Hux's hand had stopped playing absentmindedly with the contents of a small metallic package and swiftly put it in a coat pocket.

Kylo had never been allowed to smoke, as Ben, but both his parents had done it occasionally even if Han considered it a duty to tell Leia periodically that she should quit. If he hadn't been wearing the helmet perhaps he would've caught the smell in passing—clinging, coming off of the General's clothes—and recognized it for what it was. The air ventilation on most parts of the ship was far too good for it to linger in any one place for long.

"You've been smoking!" Not even the voice modulator could keep the surprise and slight distaste from his voice.

The immediate response he received was a defensive: "And what's it to _you?"_

Now, Hux didn't fidget so much as once at anytime that Kylo had been able to see. In fact, the Knight of Ren had the impression that Hux _didn't fidget,_ point blank. Not in the conventional way most people did.

But, right then, realizing the untoward bluntness of his own words and the fact he'd been caught shamelessly breaking one of his own rules, Kylo could tell he _wanted_ to.

Hux was standing off to his side, hands curling into fist in an overly formal salute, back ramrod straight and face set.

A part of him was starting to be increasingly certain that _that_ face was the Hux version of ‘internally panicking’.

"I meant to say, you can accuse me of nothing yet. Although I do admit to contemplating the possibility," the General swiftly corrected himself without missing a beat. "Now, since you refused to answer me the first time: _what do you require of me_ , Lord Ren?"

The words had been dripping sarcastic disdain.

Much too used to such treatment, Kylo was not so easily discouraged.

"I brought you this from the mess hall." He extended the food on one hand like a peace offering between them. His own voice losing any edge of hesitation it might've held due to the voice modulator. "I _require_ that you eat."

 _Because everyone has been pretty much done with you for the past three weeks and yesterday you actually snapped at the mousy Ensign in charge of managing your schedule that you recently promoted to Lieutenant and Captain Phasma of all people is palpably starting to worry._ Ben did not add. But it was a close thing.

Hux huffed at him. _"I'll_ eat that the day _you_ take that blasted helmet off."

Well two could play at that game.

As usual ignoring the voice in his head that told him this was a very, _very_ bad idea—he ascertained with the Force that they were still alone and would remain so. _(Because he knew Snoke might make an exception for Hux, if begrudgingly, since the General was a useful asset, but anyone else here who happened to see his face would be a liability not worth keeping around.)_

Once the deed was done, he put both hands on the clasps, hesitantly took off the helmet then ever so slowly as if dealing with easily startled fauna placed it on the floor. Proceeding none-too-eagerly to look to Hux for any signs of approval.

Hux shifted his gaze from eager face to oppressive helmet and back again as if he'd been startled unexpectedly and let out a small _huh,_ which was actually the equivalent of an incredulous gasp from any normal person who understood what emoting was. He raised a skeptical eyebrow, eyed the pair of ration bars Kylo had tried to hand him somewhat critically as said eyebrow went even higher, scoffed after reliably making sure there had been no malicious tampering whatsoever—or so the Knight of Ren supposed—and promptly turned back towards the stars.

It was almost funny, Kylo couldn't even be disappointed

"What, not even a thank you, Hux?" He whispered confidentially through his apparently uncontrollable grin as he straightened up the neck of his robes.

Hux gave him a disapproving glare for taking the trouble of continuing to speak. One that made Kylo avoid his eyes, yet instead of doing anything to quell the grin somehow just made it all the harder to suppress.

He could bet this was _not_ the standard reaction most people had to Hux being Hux. Because he'd _seen_ the standard reaction yes, but mostly for the way the man eyed him strangely. As if he thought _Kylo_ was deranged for not being instantaneously afraid of _him._

"So miracles do occur, colour me surprised." Hux's voice was dry and not amused, as always, and his face appeared displeased as his glance shifted to the side.

Kylo wasn't sure why, but it felt like an improvement over the indifferent dismissals and angered stare downs which he had been given thus far.

The General did smell strongly of smoke, this close.

"You should eat." He said, voice slightly charged with concern, and barely managed to cover it up quickly enough. "I complied with your request. It's only fair, after all."

Hux sighed resignedly. "I suppose you do not plan on leaving me alone until I acquiesce." There was irritation there, and a somewhat uncharacteristic lack of patience mixed with something indecipherable. "If I do, will you _leave me be?"_

Meanwhile, Kylo had stealthily advanced a fair share of the distance separating them, nearly touching their shoulders together. Inclining his head to the right as he spoke in a way that most would consider a gesture for eye sight.

_(It wasn't.)_

"People have kicked me out for less than I've done in the past month alone." He confided, not so much carefully tiptoeing around the question as quite unsubtly flinging it out of the nearest airlock. Made the lacking effort to explain a fact he'd no doubt Hux already knew, then pushed his luck too by handing the man both ration bars. In his confused state, Hux could do little else but take them. Only then did he continue. "They'd all say you deserve a medal just for putting up with me for this long, the least I can do is bring you food."

Hux eyed the ration bars dubiously again like a couple of vipers he expected would bite, twirling them periodically in both his hands under a sharp considering glare, probably still searching for evidence of poisoning and malicious tampering of other sorts. Then became aware that they were in _his_ hands now, and kicked Kylo's ankle. Hard.

It was half-hearted at best, it didn't even hurt. It was so sudden and childish it made him laugh.

"What was that for?"

"Something." Hux affirmed, stubbornly narrowing his eyes in the direction of some distant star. "You've done _something._ I just have no idea what, yet."

He couldn't suppress a snort. "Sure. That's fair."

"I'm not a violent person Ren," Hux sighed again, shoulders dropping. Briefly making eye contact before rapidly averting his eyes anew, still neglecting the need to turn his head from the stars as they spoke. "Not usually. I am merely practical." Seeming finally to decide he trusted Kylo enough or, more likely, felt famished enough to take the risk as a leap of either logic or faith or both. Tearing apart the wrapping then tearing into both ration bars one at a time with elegant movements and a desperate ravenous hunger only given away by the speed of the whole thing. Swallowing one whole within seconds with minimal chewing before he kept on speaking. Keeping the other intact, hidden flat against his chest as if Kylo would take it from him otherwise. "But there's just something about you that makes me want to _start throwing punches."_

By the manner the hand holding on to the remaining vitamin D, iron and protein supplement bar squeezed the thing through its wrapper until it was positively misshapen—no easy fit, that—before the man devoured it in record time too, Kylo could most definitely believe him.

Still, Ben felt like he had a right to be offended, and Kylo was surprisingly inclined to agree with him.

He contended bravely with the childish impulse to kick Hux's ankle right back.

He gave up halfway through.

Hux returned it. "You kicked me!"

Kylo did the same. "You started it!"

Hux was the first to stop, as if suddenly realizing what the situation had been devolving into, his lips twitching slightly in what could be the beginnings of either a smile or a sneer.

"I refuse to lower myself to your standards."

Kylo was about to kick him again, and call him a hypocrite for good measure, but the faint hint of fond amusement to the words stopped him dead in his tracks.

Hux has always been the kind of man who could cut you into your constituent parts with a half-second glance, and Kylo had learned to take that in stride and remain undeterred.

He knew Hux best when distrustful, angry and unapproachable. Breath oozing of electric storms.

He didn't know what to do with _amusement._

He did a double take, and suddenly took notice of Hux's eyes. Fighting to stay open, gray-green glazed over with exhaustion giving off the impression that the General wasn't entirely there, the shadows beneath them darker than usual _(a fit in and of itself, because Kylo had little doubt the man might overwork himself to death if left unchecked)._ Flickering open and close from time to time as if the redhead were trying to keep himself awake, but closer now and set completely on Kylo's own. He had turned his head unwittingly, so that if they were any closer they'd almost be nose to nose, and Kylo could see his entire face at last.

It was faintly flushed, a deeper shade by a niche, once his mind caught up with him and he finally took note of the proximity. Flushed but only slightly, refusing to back out of their impromptu stare down. Not glowering but glowing under the dim lighting of the overhead light, still the one from gamma shift because people rarely if ever used this room, his mouth moving into a line of what could have been something neutral if it wasn't so clear by the crinkle of his eyes it could only have been affection.

Something softer had eased the General's gaze as Ben glanced at him. It disappeared just as quickly, but the man no longer appeared quite as guarded as before.

He wondered, bizarrely, if this was what fondness looked like in Hux's face. If it would be this or something more marked, something—not sharper, exactly, but more pronounced.

"Kissing someone who smokes is like licking an ashtray." Hux said abruptly, his voice so neutral it almost distracted from the hesitation. The way he bit his cheek, averting his eyes first during one of their contests for the very first time since they'd met. "It's not a pleasant experience, I wouldn't recommend it."

"You don't know that." He was quick to defend. "You can't know that."

Hux laughed in his face again, though a lot more subdued than the last time, and much less cruel than it was deprecating. "You don't know that I don't. It is rude to assume."

 _How would you know?_ Ben ached to insist. _Maybe it's not. Maybe it'll feel like kissing nebulae. Maybe it'll feel like_ _—_

Kylo stopped himself from saying it out loud, because truthfully Ben himself had heard from Han in good faith _that it was not,_ and because he had no way to tell if Hux did or didn't know how it felt.

"I'll take the risk then."

"Perhaps we shouldn't—"

Hux froze mid sentence, and appeared to take conscious notice just a few milliseconds after Kylo moved that their faces were in fact mere millimeters from one another. Close enough now Kylo could almost feel the lacking warmth radiating off the other man's skin.

Hux's nose was decorated with the faintest dusting of freckles. A few dots arranged in some chaotic pattern whose color hesitated somewhere between terracotta and pale pink.

They weren't easy to spot, even from this close. But although practically invisible and almost completely faded, they were _there._

He grinned because he couldn't help himself, unable to resist the gravitational pull. Hux's gaze fell from his eyes to his lips for the fraction of a second it took the redhead to redirect it back; his breath caught before his own eyes widened and he pulled away like a rubber band snapped.

A hand was placed between them, directly over the black robes covering Kylo's chest as if to physically dissuade him from taking that final step, a heart beat fast against it. Its owner reclaimed it promptly as if otherwise it might catch fire.

"What are you doing?" His voice was wary, when he asked. Kylo thought it contained the barest hint of a quiver.

 _Kissing you,_ Ben replied, on reflex alone. _Obviously. Because you haven't kicked me to the curb yet and I like you a lot actually. Because I thought it made sense. Because I thought you wanted to kiss me_ _—_

Kylo, on the other hand, did not say any of _that._ Which, thank the Force.

"I have no idea." He helplessly admitted instead, which truthfully was no better.

 _I thought you wanted to kiss me,_ Ben wanted, desperately, to say. Because it was the truth. It felt like the truth. He might not have been able to _understand_ Hux the way he could look at others sometimes and _just know,_ but he could _guess,_ and Hux was too much like the panels of the window they were both standing in front of.

While sometimes Hux was as opaque as space itself or the dull metal of their ship, sometimes Hux was as transparent as the glass as seen from the inside. And what Hux had wanted more than anything else at that earlier moment of clear _transparency_ before he pulled away had been to keep Kylo here. Here alone. With only Hux, and no one else within his reach.

"I hated you the day I first met you, you know." Hux admitted. Blurted out, still facing him, equally as helplessly. "I wanted to kill you."

This time, Kylo was the one who froze; which in hindsight might've actually been what Hux was attempting to accomplish.

"I could tell." And he could, couldn't he? He'd felt it then. He didn't now. What did he, what did anyone, say to something like that? "Do you—still want that?"

"…I might. I have to. I don't know."

_"Why?"_

_"Ren—"_

There was a flicker then. A flicker just like the one from so many months ago, when Kylo found Hux _curled around the handrail likeacat—_

His train of thought derailed when realization hit.

"You're _outflowing."_

That turn of phrase hadn't been his.

He didn't know how he hadn't seen it before. It'd been obvious, in hindsight. The way his signature shattered, the way it was eternally rearranging itself, the shards that didn't fit _had to go somewhere._

So they just separated.

Hux frowned uncomprehendingly at him for the impromptu change of topic. "I am _what,_ now?"

Ben though, Ben was too busy thinking of all the horrifying implications to let Kylo respond.

And really, how did you explain to someone _that their soul was flaking off?_ That if it continued to it was bound to grow so thin it might as well not exist _and that was the best case scenario?_

"Ren, explain! Why are you staring at me like that?"

Kylo was too focused on the lump that restricted his throat to say much of anything anymore, so he took a step closer and this time firmly established the link between their shoulders as he himself locked his eyes to the windows. Focused all of his energy into sending warmth and safety through every fleeting point of contact until even Hux's Force-Null brain picked up on what he was doing.

It earned him yet another step of distance and _real_ glare, which wasn't what he'd been aiming for at all, but it was _something_ other than that worryingly thoughtful frown from earlier.

_(Adapting to being unable to read someone by gauging their thoughts and emotions might've been easier if it hadn't been **Hux** he was trying to read.)_

"I'll ask again." That tone was steel. It was the General's tone just before verbal chastisement came. "And do not test my patience any longer, _what are you doing?"_

He stopped moving, took a deep breath and psychologically prepared himself for a long and very complex explanation about the nature of the Force itself. "When I'm near someone, I can sometimes sense—"

A very unpleasant realization settled Hux's features into cold, furious calm. Near instantly, any trace of confusion disintegrated. He looked like someone had given him an answer to the mysteries of the universe, and it was just about the worst he could've imagined.

It wasn't a real question when he affirmed:

"You're reading my mind."

"I'm not!" He was quick, too quick, to deny. And for once it _was_ the truth.

He hadn't, until then, even been trying to.

The things kept at bay in the back of Hux's mind fought to be heard though: the memories, the broken promises, the pools of personal depth.

Kylo pushed them down. They weren't his to hear, Hux made that very clear, and independent of the fact _he wouldn't understand them if he tried_ he had no need to disregard nor disrespect the implied request. They faded back to white noise within his own head; faint static underneath his subconscious.

Hux wasn't finished however. "That's why you seek me out," he continued, not even accusing just matter of fact, and Kylo thought _Wait,_ and Ben thought _No._ "That's why you're always close, you _needed_ to be close." But it stayed unheard and Hux kept going, voice gaining conviction, and Ben wanted to yell _You're wrong, that's not it at all,_ but Kylo stayed silent. "You didn't stay near me by choice _you needed to be close_ to—"

"That's not—"

Hux was too busy working the implications like a mechanism. "Did Snoke put you up to it, or did you simply find some sort of personal enjoyment from messing with my head?"

"I'm not—I wasn't—"

"Ren. Just how much of an idiot do you bloody think I am."

Kylo gritted his teeth. He wanted to be angry, and then realized he didn't have much reason to be. Not for himself. Yet anger was so good and familiar and _wanted._ Without it, he felt almost—at a loss.

"No, don't answer that. I _was_ an idiot."

And it just wasn't _fair._

Perhaps it was that Hux was genuinely different from any of the other human beings he'd ever met, much the way his ship was different, and the idea of not being given more time to puzzle him out was making Kylo cripplingly lonely in a way he hadn't felt since before the New Jedi.

Perhaps it was that, if he could reliably read Hux's mind, the accusations wouldn't even be too much of a stretch.

And, want to as he might, he couldn't truthfully claim he'd never _tried._

Taking his lack of an answer for answer enough, Hux let out something like a humorless laugh. "Yeah, that's what I thought. How close?"

Ben blurted out: "What?"

He'd expected the redhead to storm off. Kylo had expected much the same. Yet Ben had hoped, and that had put him in the best position to speak first.

"How close?!" Hux demanded again. When it became apparent Kylo needed context he continued. "How close do you need to be to be able to do it?"

"I—" the answer got stuck in his throat. "Within arm's reach at least," he was fast to add: "but I can't get a proper read on you!"

"Why not."

Kylo was certain that Hux was the only person who could make a question sound nothing like a question. He recognized the statement for the demand it was, not the inquiry it was pretending to be.

Ben wanted to keep talking, trying to explain. Yet somehow, Kylo thought blurting out _Your mind is a mess_ might make Hux even more hostile and disinclined to listen. _Might._

"You're—in a different wavelength, too much static, you think too fast about too many things." He said instead. "Makes it hard to catch up. Harder to keep track of." Attempted to take a conciliatory step closer and was rewarded by the tip of a blade to his throat faster than he could blink. Certainly faster than he could've thought to step back or use the Force to redirect the trajectory as he dodged.

If Hux had wanted him death, he _would_ be death.

"So you were trying to see if you could decipher it? Get used to it?!"

"I wasn't trying to read you!" _Not consciously anyway,_ Ben silently added. Kylo just kept talking. If he kept Hux talking, the General wasn't leaving or focusing on stabbing him. "I was just—I wanted to…"

 _I wanted to kiss you,_ Ben wanted to say.

 _You never look happy,_ Ben wanted to say.

 _Your signature is broken,_ Ben wanted to say, urged him to say, but Kylo simply— _couldn't._

They'd been here before.

Kylo didn't know how or when, but _they'd been here before._

Not this exact conversation, not this exact position, and yet—

The first phrase Hux ever willingly said to him resurfaced. Echoing through his skull at every turn:

_Do I know you?_

…He'd felt this way with countless other people before, thought it yet another aspect of the Force. This was the first time he'd ever questioned it, the first time something— _someone_ —felt _wrong._

He stared at Hux. Stared at Hux like he couldn't help himself, reaching for something— _anything_ —that was recognizable. Trying to decipher him like he did the Force, once, when he'd been desperate enough to try each and every one of the other Jedi students' approach even whilst knowing every time it'd end in failure. Knowing deep down somehow that their way had nothing for him at the end of it.

_(But they'd never given up on him had they? Never stopped trying to teach him their ways, always went after him as if they were aware of where he would go because they just knew him that well. They weren't **Luke** , they'd never **abandoned** him, even when he fled the flaming temple in an attempt to protect them from himself and the other things pursuing **him** —)_

He stared at Hux with his gelled flaring red mane not a hair out of place and his solemn, furious, tired eyes—and tried to place him.

Hux who was so distinctive, physically and mentally, there's no way Kylo could've ever met him before—met him as _Ben,_ as wrong as the notion felt—and _not_ remember it. Not even if it were somehow possible that he forgot.

And when Hux finally met his eyes defiantly once again, Kylo suddenly realized that the man felt it too. The strange connection. The way something between them crackled like a malfunctioning blaster or a faulty electric wire, like a path that had already been paved— _already laid to waste—_

They shook themselves out of it at the same time, with Kylo only able to tell by the manner Hux blinked: rapidly, twice, as if waking himself from a dream or the vestige of a memory.

He kept himself still, forced himself to remain silent even as his heart started pounding rapidly because _Hux felt it, Hux felt it too._

And, of course, it was rather obvious that Hux felt it too. Hux wouldn't have been the one to have pointed it out in the first place if he didn't feel it. Kylo himself wouldn't have noticed if Hux didn't feel it. Even if what Hux felt seemed to be just the hint of it—the annoyance of seeing someone in the crowd that you _knew_ you knew, but no matter what weren't able to place.

The feeling of being stalked by a predator in the wilderness. Knowing it was there but not knowing when it would bite, where the pounce would come from.

He was certain Hux didn't feel, _couldn't_ feel, this unique, instinctive, cultivated rivalry with hints of bitterness and hints of— _something else_ in kind.

Of this something that wasn't quite friendship as much as an odd sort of fondness, a resigned and begrudging respect. This something that went deeper and went darker and urged him to respond—

_Do I know you?_

This odd kind of— _belonging,_ beneath it all.

_Do I_ _—_ _?!_

_( **Yes** , something within him yearned to say, to yell as loud as his voice would stretch. **Yes you do, yes you know me, yes I know you. I've known you for a long long time even if this time you're not ~~you~~ don't you dare leave again**—)_

…It hurt to see Hux pick his own proverbial mask back up from wherever it'd dropped. See him build the wall between them right back up again like he hadn't even been conscious that it'd fallen.

The way his eyes dulled at the same time that they sharpened, devoid from any and all hints of life, any and all hints of emotion. The way the fragments of his signature—his _very being_ —seemed to merge into a facsimile of that calm even surface they'd at first appeared to be, solidifying in united effort against him into something even more familiar as the sneer made a comeback; not quite as genuine, not quite as demeaning.

_(He did **not** know how he knew just how genuine it was. Didn't know how something within him that was the Force but not **quite** could almost tell. When Hux was faking it, when Hux was feeling it, when Hux was forcing himself to maintain it with all of his might—)_

"Now I don't know what I was worrying about." The redhead grinned, suddenly, almost mournfully. "If your first instinct when showed someone's neck is to go in for the kill then I've no need to instruct you on how things work around here."

One part of that sentence struck Ben the hardest. "Instruct me…?"

The General stared at him as if it were obvious. "You've been assigned to the man in charge of designing brainwashing techniques." Hux laid out bluntly, in a very flat tone. "You were tasked to keep an eye on me, I presume, surely it isn't that much of a stretch to guess at what was asked of _me."_

 _That can't be it._ Kylo told himself.

He'd been assigned to other people before.

That all of them had been involved in some way with previous facets of the recruitment program hadn't registered until now.

"You haven't been, though."

Nor the fact that Hux was the only one thus far who hadn't tried to mold him into something he was not.

"Haven't I?"

It seemed the man disagreed.

Hux gave another long considering look as if to memorize his features. Sketch them. Searching Kylo's own mask within a mask with a trace of something akin to urgency as if somehow he'd be able to see the person underneath. As if somehow he _were_ able to.

It hurt to see him straighten his posture and turn around. Walk away again, deeming it not worth the effort.

It _hurt_ even though he didn't know why nor let himself show it. Hurt even though, rationally, he was convinced it shouldn't have.

It hurt yet his face stayed a mask throughout. A faulty mask hidden behind the real one meant to replace it, as he picked the latter up and placed it back on too, where it belonged.

He aggressively forced himself to shun the feeling. Resisting the want to call out to Hux— _talk to him to warn him to tell him_ —through sheer willpower alone.

_(Tell him **what**?!)_

He'd see Hux tomorrow. He'd see Hux _tomorrow._ It felt stupid, to take comfort in that, in telling himself that… but he did.

They'd be in and out of the as-of-yet-unfinished Base for a while yet, and although the snow would give him chills for far more reasons than the cold he found he didn't nearly as much mind, now.

He'd see Hux tomorrow, _because they'd both be alive then,_ and he'd make a better attempt at explaining himself then too _just in case_ that wasn't the case the day after.

He wouldn't screw this up again.

 _…_ _Your soul is broken._ Ben was still saying, less horrified, far more determined now. _I don't know how or why, Hux, but your soul is breaking._

And the reasons for that, Kylo decided then, he would like to find out too.

Because for a moment, Hux had been more than just the high-ranking General he was meant to work with. More than just the man who seemed to long for some distant place among the stars.

Had been human, at last. So close, so real, so _there._

It's hard to imagine he's breaking apart. Hard to imagine even now there's pieces of him slipping away.

He vowed to catch them all. Without meaning to. Without quite knowing _why._

_Do I know you?_ His brain provided.

A question. An answer. A reminder.

No, he didn't. No, he didn't, not yet.

And what he felt? What _they both felt?_ That wasn't good… not for either of them. It was a connection but it was _broken, too_ —but he'd find a way to mend it yet. And if he couldn't he'd just build something new from it.

Truthfully, he hadn't much experience on that front: not wrecking things. You didn't get much worse than that though. Who cared _why_ it was there? It was just a foundation; it didn't _define_ him, either of them.

…So Hux's signature was leaking, _outflowing,_ and that was still horrifying on principle, and he still wanted to find out _why._ And it wouldn't be _easy,_ getting close enough to, what with the man trying to hinder him at every turn—

But he stood there and he stared out at the stars and he _vowed to catch them,_ all of those pieces.

Even if it felt childish and futile like promising himself he'd reach out and gather all those fragments of infinity outside the viewing port, he vowed to catch them.

He just didn't yet know if he'd returned them.

If he wanted to, if he possibly _could,_ return them.

But he'd catch as many as he could.

_(For the first time in a long time and despite it all, he didn't feel alone. And that, even through the threat and lingering cold of **snow** , made him smile beneath the oppressive mask.)_

…He still had hope he'd get to explain the situation at the very least, even if Hux didn't believe him. That he'd _get_ an explanation, himself. So he lingered around the window soothed by the increasingly familiar sound of the ship's engines until he was startled out of his reverie by the sudden start of the Destroyer as the planet that would one day become Starkiller started to fade into view. Its size decreasing as if the Finalizer were moving away from it.

The ship shuddered. The stars elongated.

Momentarily, Kylo panicked. Conscious as he was of the cloud of dark unfinished thoughts the Base had left around his head and of the man in charge of turning Ilum into a weapon.

He knew that, the moment they parted, Hux would stay behind for another couple of months at least.

Surely that wasn't _today,_ was it?

Except the planet kept retreating until it was nothing but a pinprick in the distance, and then the stars kept elongating until the white-blue streaks of hyperspace replaced them all.

Soon later, he'd ask Lieutenant Mitaka. Hux's attaché. And he'd get told, after threatening insistence, that the official departure date was still about a week away but that by his own admission the General ‘had simply decided to save time’.

So he was left alone and angry and in charge of a whole ship and its whole crew completely on his own when Snoke had been no help as far as preparation went and Hux had barely bothered to give him the crash course on how the whole of it worked.

After it'd sunk in, he found the fastest route to the nearest empty control room and started a _rampage._

With the Force as his conduit and without Hux there to stop him, it lasted four hours.

When he'd finally tired himself out, he was informed by the woman herself that Phasma was the one to ‘take partial control of the important technicalities of leadership while he was indisposed’, with a practiced ease that spoke to Kylo of years spent observing the trade and a familiarity with—if not gift for—leadership itself.

She'd taken it upon herself to make Hux's Lieutenant attaché her own assistant as a temporary arrangement, because, in her own words: _No one knows quite as much about the way our ship is run than one of the few people the General himself trusts to help him run it._

Kylo found himself thanking her in the midst of his relief, instead of dealing whatever punishment someone as controlling as his Master might've dealt. And making a mental note of the fact that no one else, not even officers of equal or higher rank than hers, had even thought to question the occurrence.

Going by her word, Phasma herself seemed to be one of those few trusted individuals.

…It wasn't until the eerie calmness in the aftermath of his wave of destruction that he realized a key fact which had previously escaped his notice:

Hux hadn't told him to leave.

 _Hux hadn't told him to leave._ Unlike every other of the many Commanders Kylo had passed through, Hux had never, not once, considered telling him to leave.

Even when he felt betrayed and like he needed the distance, he'd found it far preferable for himself to stay behind.

_(In hindsight, it shouldn't have surprised him that that might've been the plan all along.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This be where I would put a joke… _If I had one._
> 
> (Are we honoring that "Poor Dopheld Mitaka" tag yet? I think we are.)
> 
> Honestly this chapter contains many, and I mean MANY of my favorite lines. See if you can spot them—wouldn't mind hearing yours, if you have any.
> 
> This one needs more revising. Will do later. We should also be back to the present soon. Not next chapter, but soon.
> 
> (Still need to tag Unfortunate Implications. I think. Also AU. Also _also,_ what even is formating anymore?)
> 
> That's it, I have nothing else to say.
> 
> Alright no, I _do,_ but I can't articulate it right now because _college._ College is not kind to creativity.
> 
> Fact is, I mostly gave you these as-is because I couldn't afford to publish separately at the time. Since the length is appropriate though I think I might divide this and the past two chapters in far preferable even halves of 7k+ to keep with the original plan (properly rearranging some parts and adding a bit of content to fill in while I do, but not anything that would make much of a difference so you won't have to reread), since less than 9k has been the ideal number of words from the start and the self-imposed 14k limit was mostly there for the intermissions and not for my creativity to abuse. Naive, in hindsight, that I didn't expect it'd need it.
> 
> Like I said, nothing major, just need to rework some parts and make a cleaner transition during editing so it'll read better. I was actually mid process concerning that during December and had to cut off when classes started. So if it suddenly seems like there's more chapters than there was all at once? It's likely that. If I've the time, it'll happen this weekend.
> 
> I have also decided when I have the time I might just invest in hover / pop-up click text just so I can remove the prior author notes and put them there, to make the story reading experience smoother. So I don't remove them but they're still readable in case anyone is curious.
> 
> I love you people, but no promises _whatsoever_ about next week. Read you later!
> 
> (Oh, and if you're here from the first chapter? Nice having you, fellow shipper. Feel free to read from Chapter 2 on to where you started if you can. Now please excuse me while I— *collapses*)

**Author's Note:**

> Well, enough of my chatter! Fair warning: AO3 and my computer both have a tendency to eat my formating, so beware some rampant peer editing, mostly for better readability. If you enjoyed this and feel like it (or saw some glaring grammar mistakes I ain't picky) do leave a comment and/or some kudos. Those are a writer's lifeblood. Trust me, we need them, they're the best kind of encouragement. Besides, I'd love to hear your thoughts! Who knows, I might just reveal something of note in between my relentless ramblings ;)


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